Welcome to our final Weekend Picks for July! Audra Slocum has another amazing read for us this week: Daniel Nayeri's 2020 Everything Sad Is Untrue: (A True Story), which has won a number of awards including: Michael L. Printz Award (2021), Judy Lopez Memorial Award for Children's Literature (2021), and Walter Dean Myers Award Nominee for Younger Readers Category (2021).
 Audra Slocum | Dr. Audra Slocum is an Associate Professor of Secondary English Education and the Director of Teacher Education at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Prior to joining OU, she was an associate professor at West Virginia University and co-director of the National Writing Project at WVU for 10 years. She has presented at NCTE, AERA, and WVCTE and published in English Education, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Her scholarship primarily focuses on how teenagers from linguistically marginalized communities navigate oppressive norms in secondary English classrooms. As a teacher educator, she prepares secondary English students to be actively anti-oppressive as they employ core teaching practices. |
Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri
Everything Sad Is Untrue is a self-aware, beautiful memoir that constantly reminds readers of the slippery nature of memory. Written from the perspective of a middle schooler composing essays for his classmates and English teacher, Daniel Nayeri recounts his life as a child in Iran and later as a refugee in Dubai, Italy, and eventually Oklahoma.
 | Nayeri is deeply versed in Iranian poets, myths and history, and he relates himself to Scheherazade as the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights. Like Scheherazade, he uses storytelling as a lifeline—an act of survival. His narrative moves fluidly between myth, history, memory, and immediate experience, mimicking the way the mind wanders. This nonlinear, fourth-wall-breaking style may disorient some readers, but for me—especially in the audiobook, wonderfully narrated by the author—it brought the story vividly to life. His authentic narration delighted me as he jumped from one fragmented memory to another. Central to the memoir is love: the unconditional love of his Babagi (paternal grandfather), his father’s complicated love, and most importantly, his mother’s unwavering devotion. |
Central to the memoir is love: the unconditional love of his Babagi (paternal grandfather), his father’s complicated love, and most importantly, his mother’s unwavering devotion. When Nayeri is little, his mother converts to Christianity which is a capital crime in Iran, so the family must flee under threat of death. After being refugees in Dubai and Italy, they move to Oklahoma when he is eight years old. They live in poverty, with his mother working full-time while attending school. She soon marries an abusive man. Please note that the book contains brief mentions of physical violence. Nayeri also endures relentless racism and bullying at school and on the bus.
| Despite these heavy themes—refugee trauma, domestic abuse, alienation—Nayeri’s voice is full of wonder, vulnerability, and humor. His poetic language is breathtaking. He has poignant phrases laid out like pomegranate seeds, each one asking for you to pause in shared wonder. In addition, he’s also laugh-out-loud funny, often sharing cringeworthy, self-deprecating stories that feel painfully real. One of the most evocative parts of the memoir is the role of food and feeling of connectedness to Iranian culture. Nayeri’s memories are steeped in taste and family—his mom’s cooking, his grandmother’s dishes, his favorite Iranian candies (some reminiscent of Mounds bars). I found myself looking up recipes for the foods he described, eager to experience them myself. Everything Sad Is Untrue is a rich, layered memoir that invites readers into a boy’s fragmented but deeply felt world—one shaped by exile, resilience, and the stories that help us survive. |  Daniel Nayeri |
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