Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram - 2.5 stars

[Heather Reads Books]

(I was hovering between 2-3 stars as a rating, but after getting all my thoughts out, I'm gonna settle on 2.5, rounded down, because of the reasons discussed below.)

I have a variety of conflicting feelings about this one. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. I was torn between finding some sections poignant, and others repetitive and boring. I think maybe the marketing material misled my expectations, but the scope of this story ended up being much smaller than I was hoping, with much lower stakes, and that was ultimately disappointing.

Darius the Great is Not Okay tells the story of Darius Kellner, a 16-year-old high schooler from Portland, Oregon who is half Persian, half German. When his maternal grandfather is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, his family travels to Iran for the first time in his life. There, he not only bonds with his extended family, but a neighborhood boy named Sohrab Rezaei.

And that's kind of it.

During reading this, I joked that a more apt title might be Darius the Great Seems Fine, because there aren't really that many obstacles for him in this book. Alternately, when I was feeling less charitable toward the narrator, I thought maybe it should be called Darius the Great Needs to Grow Up.

It becomes pretty clear right away that this book isn't about what I wanted it to be: it was marketed as something with LGBT representation, and between that and the trip to Iran where Darius meets a boy his own age, I so wanted this to be a gay love story set in a place where being gay isn't just not okay – it's a crime, sometimes punishable by death.

It's definitely not about that. In fact, Darius's sexuality never really comes up. It's clear he's noticing boys and feeling attraction toward them, but that's it. While it's fine that this is not the end-all-be-all of his character – thank God, as those type of depictions have long been criticized in LGBT representations in fiction – the fact that it's not even addressed at all started making me think the author was avoiding conflict on purpose.

This sentiment would be repeated throughout the book, when the narrative brought us into situations I thought would be rife with opportunities for external conflict. For example, when landing in Tehran, Darius's mother and sister have to don hijabs even though they're not Muslim. What does Darius think about this? Well, nothing. He's too busy making Star Trek: The Next Generation references in his head and thinking everyone hates him. Later, when Sohrab tells him his father is a political prisoner because he's a religious minority, what does Darius think about this? Well, not much, because he's too busy beating himself up over not being able to comfort Sohrab correctly. And so on. While this at times felt like spot-on teenage behavior, it made it difficult for me to root for Darius, since he never had any agency in these situations yet still made them all about himself. Later, when Sohrab calls him out for being selfish, I was on Sohrab's side – even though I think the book was trying to convince me to feel for Darius in those moments. (view spoiler)[Sorry, everyone, but when someone's father has been stabbed to death in the prison where he's wrongfully incarcerated because he's a persecuted minority, I'm going to feel for that kid more than his upper-middle class American friend. Call me callous, but there it is. (hide spoiler)]

It's not that I don't understand what the point of the book is (and even if I didn't, author Adib Khorram spells it out in the author's note at the end): clinical depression sucks. It sucks to experience, it sucks to witness, it sucks that it's caused by a chemical imbalance and not anything "wrong" in your life, it sucks that there's still widespread stigma about it. But in trying to drive this point home, the author ended up making his protagonist the least interesting character in the book. It's like he feared that if the reader could point to any external conflict in Darius's life, we could think he did have a reason to be depressed after all – and that's like, not the point.

Unfortunately, the author sets the story in a place that should be teeming with external conflict, just in the amount of culture shock there would be in Iran for someone who's only ever lived in Portland, Oregon, never mind all the political tensions. I found myself wondering when this novel was actually taking place – clearly it wasn't during the Trump era. I guess it's either happening during the Obama administration, or in an alternate world where Hillary Clinton is president, because there's sure no mention of the Muslim ban, on which Iran is one of the targeted countries (could have been a perfect opportunity to point out the arbitrariness of the measures, since Darius's family is Zoroastrian, not even Muslim). I also wondered what the Iranian characters would think of such US policy, never mind the rising tensions between US-Iranian relations the last few years. (The Qasem Soleimani stuff notwithstanding, since this was published in 2018. But things have been getting steadily worse ever since Obama left office – like the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, etc.) But it's never mentioned at all, just barely acknowledged as a reason Darius's mother was afraid to come back and visit. And Darius is just so uncurious about learning more, despite being obsessed with a sci fi show that is all about political conflicts between different cultures? The missed opportunities are staggering.

Perhaps one could argue that this is a YA book, and all these heavy political topics are too much to put in a novel for teenagers. But I would counter that this is the perfect target audience for some of these bigger issues. Don't teenagers want to learn more about the world? I know I did when I was a teen. The depiction of the world in Darius the Great is Not Okay felt stiflingly artificial, where everyone would magically be friends as long as they put in the effort. It seemed to be advocating for burying your head in the sand about larger sociopolitical issues, for focusing on yourself and not others, for going along to get along.

I think our young adults deserve better.