It Ain't So Awful, Falafel

Firoozeh Dumas (Funny in Farsi) makes her middle-grade fiction debut with her semi-autobiographical novel It Ain't So Awful, Falafel.

The summer of 1978, Zomorod Yousefzadeh renames herself Cindy, after Brady Bunch Cindy, the most normal American name she knows: "It's not like I'm trying to pretend that I'm not Iranian. I just want people to ask questions about me when we meet, not about where I'm from." After bouncing back and forth from Iran to California for years, Cindy is now adapting to sixth grade in Newport Beach, balancing her parents' expectations--including being her mother's translator--with fitting in as a "normal" tween. With her new friend Carolyn as her guide, Cindy discovers taco nights, Girl Scouts, Halloween, sleepaway camp and more. And then her home country is in revolution: the Shah is ousted, Ayatollah Khomeini takes brutal control and Americans are held hostage for 444 days. Being Iranian in the U.S. becomes a matter of survival: Cindy's father loses his engineering job and can't find another, family funds quickly dwindle, and bumper stickers proclaiming "Iranians: Go Home!" seem ubiquitous.

Through Cindy's feisty, observant voice, the author distills a difficult chapter in U.S. history into an accessible coming-of-age novel. Deftly mixing droll humor ("Please excuse Cindy from the test today. Our country just had a revolution."), reality checks (a dead rodent left on her family's doorstep as a warning), and gracious empathy ("people... are not truly horrible; they just need a geography class, a passport, and a few foreign friends"), Dumas draws on the nurturing power of family and friends to prove It Ain't So Awful indeed. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

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