Everything Sad Is Untrue
Written by Daniel Nayeri
Originally published in 2020
~360 pages
Rate 4/5
If you asked me what this book was about I'd probably tell you it was about a kid who was forced to grow up to fast. However, I'd also like to mention it's a story about hope. "The hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue."
The story follows Daniel as he experiences life as a refugee alongside his older sister and his mother as they make their way from Iran to Oklahoma. In Oklahoma despite being safe from the potential danger in Iran, Daniel experiences discrimination from the kids at school. Despite his classmates disdain for him he continues to share stories about his life using writing prompts from the teacher; for most of the book it appears as though these are merely his assignments.
Through Daniel we as the readers learn about legends, his family history, his current family situations, food, religion, and poop. Yes, poop. I didn't realize how much a person could talk about poop, what was even more shocking is how it was interesting to read about nonetheless.
The religious aspect of the story was interesting to me, but I can't say much because I don't want to spoil it. I've found religion fascinating for sometime now, so I was hung up on this paragraph for sometime:
"Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks? A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything... Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love... God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God."
And then I realized the character asking this and saying this is 12! I don't think I would have come up with that sort of philosophy at 12!
He was so smart for his age because of all the traumatic events that had happened. The whole book it felt like he was trying to convince us he was human and that maybe he deserved what happened to him. I wished that at the end of the book he came to the conclusion that everything sad that happened to him should have been UNTRUE because no body deserves to be treated like that.
This book was full of a lot of remarkable quotes here's a few:
"It’s beautiful. How badly we all want love. It’s tragic. How bad we are at searching for it."
"Somehow, in all the world, with all the people in it, in all their wonky shapes, they were shaped to fit each other. And they found each other—born in the same country, how lucky—and both loved poetry and fruit snacks—and like poetry they felt their hearts expand infinitely in all directions when they were together, so that it was possible to forget all the pain in their lives and the world, or at least to endure it as long as they could be together. Maybe that was it."
"The thing that turns a lion into a little fox is need."