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Review: Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian

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Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian

Only This Beautiful Moment
Abdi Nazemian
HarperCollins
Published May 9, 2023

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About Only This Beautiful Moment

From the Stonewall Honor–winning author of Like a Love Story comes a sweeping story of three generations of boys in the same Iranian family. Perfect for fans of Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Darius the Great Is Not Okay.

2019. Moud is an out gay teen living in Los Angeles with his distant father, Saeed. When Moud gets the news that his grandfather in Iran is dying, he accompanies his dad to Tehran, where the revelation of family secrets will force Moud into a new understanding of his history, his culture, and himself.

1978. Saeed is an engineering student with a promising future ahead of him in Tehran. But when his parents discover his involvement in the country’s burgeoning revolution, they send him to safety in America, a country Saeed despises. And even worse—he’s forced to live with the American grandmother he never knew existed.

1939. Bobby, the son of a calculating Hollywood stage mother, lands a coveted MGM studio contract. But the fairy-tale world of glamour he’s thrust into has a dark side.

Set against the backdrop of Tehran and Los Angeles, this tale of intergenerational trauma and love is an ode to the fragile bonds of family, the hidden secrets of history, and all the beautiful moments that make us who we are today.

My Review

I read this book as part of a kidlit book club. I’d read Desert Echoes by Abdi Nazemian before and have Like a Love Story on my reading list. As I’m writing this review, his next book, Exquisite Things comes out shortly. I have to say that so far, I’m really loving all the selections we’ve read for our book club.

One of the powerful things about this book is that it follows three generations of young Iranian/Iranian-American men from three different time periods. How often do we really get to know a teen character and then see their parent and grandparent’s experiences up close in this way? I thought that was really cool.

The story opens with Moud in 2019. We meet his dad in this opening chapter, and I know I made some assumptions about him. To then zip back through time to witness Saeed as a teenager in Tehran challenged a few of the preconceptions I’d made about who he was and why he was that way. The extra time periods added a lot of layers to his and Bobby’s characters.

This is a heavily male-dominated story, but I think this is one of the instances in which that’s necessary to make the point the author is making here about generational relationships between men. Each time period shows strong women who defy gender expectations in their own ways, too, though those relationships are not the focus of the book.

All in all, Only This Beautiful Moment is a powerful story that sets a tall goal for itself and delivers on every promise.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 16 up.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used fairly infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing. A couple of short scenes show a couple touching each other. One character walks into a bathroom where a stall door gets kicked open, briefly revealing two men having sex. The description is very brief and startling to the character.

Spiritual Content
References to prayer in a life-and-death situation along with an acknowledgement that the person praying isn’t sure they believe in the God they pray to in that moment. A couple of characters repeat religion-based homophobic claims.

Violent Content
Soldiers break up a political protest, shooting into the crowd and hitting people. Bobby encounters homophobic beliefs prevalent in the 1930s. A couple of characters react with anger after discovering that people close to them are gay. One scene shows someone arrested for being gay. Moud learns of friends arrested for being gay.

Drug Content
Saeed reluctantly drinks alcohol at a party. A doctor gives Bobby a prescription medication and tells him it will help with performance nerves. (The doctor also tries to pass the pill off as a decongestant.) Another character warns Bobby about taking the pills or drinking alcohol.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use but help support this blog. I purchased a copy of this book and borrowed the audiobook version from my library. All opinions are my own.

Review: It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas

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It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel
Firoozeh Dumas
Clarion Books

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

When Zomorod Yousefzadeh and her family move (again), she decides to take the opportunity to start fresh and try to fit in with her new California schoolmates. The first thing to go? Her name. She adopts the classic Brady Bunch Cindy as her identity. After a rough start, she begins to find true friends. But when unrest in Iran turns into an American hostage crisis, Cindy begins to catch glimpses of an uglier side of the Land of the Free. Cruel bumper stickers and slogans send chilling messages to Cindy and her family. Cindy tries to protect her parents from some of the cruelty, and her friends try to encourage her that not everyone feels so negatively about Iranians. Ultimately, Cindy has to navigate her own way through the crisis and find the balance between devotion to her family, pride in her heritage, and the freedom to pursue her own individual identity.

This is the story of a young Iranian girl in the United States during a time when anti-Iranian sentiments run high. Even though we’re talking about the late 1970s, much of the conflict and hate Cindy and her family faced made me think about the way Muslim families in the US are sometimes treated in the US today. The hate and fear-based unkindness were wrong then and are just as wrong now.

While the exploration of American feeling toward Middle Easterners or Muslims is a heavy topic,  it does not dominate the story. In fact, Cindy is a spitfire girl who’s determined to stay positive and help her family as much as she can. She’s funny and kind—one of my favorite parts of the story was her voice and way of describing things. It absolutely captured, for me, what it was like to be in middle school and the kinds of friendships I had. It made me want to call my own Carolyn and Howie (Cindy’s friends) and retell our own stories from those times.

I loved this story for its own sake. I will always enjoy tales about an awkward middle school girl finding her people, discovering who she is and what really matters. At its core, that’s what Cindy’s story is, and her sense of humor and her compassionate heart make her an incredible heroine.

Beyond that, though, I think we need narratives like this one. A young Middle Eastern girl is a girl like any other girl. This story reminds us to be angry that a girl and her family face prejudice for their nationality. It reminds us of the common bonds we share as human beings, of the value of the freedoms we have as Americans and the responsibility we have to use those freedoms to promote life, liberty and happiness in the lives of those around us.

I definitely recommend this book. My daughter is ten and I really want us to read this book together this summer. The author has some great classroom resources listed on her web site, and information about the Falafel Kindness Project, a project that promotes creating a safe, bully-free environment for kids.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
None.

Spiritual Content
Cindy and her family are non-practicing Muslims. At school, she’s friends with a Christian and a Jewish girl and there’s a brief conversation about how they worship the same God.

Violent Content
While Americans are held hostage in Iran, Cindy’s family encounters hostility from neighbors and strangers. Someone leaves a dead hamster on the family’s doorstep. One man enters their house wearing a shirt that says “Wanted: Iranians for Target Practice.” Cindy briefly discusses the differences between American freedom and life in Iran, where the shah had protestors killed and free speech was a right guaranteed to the people.

Drug Content
None.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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