March 1, 2023
K wants to live like any other kid in the United States, shooting hoops with his brother and tooling around the San Fernando Valley with his friends. Instead, he's worried about being a good Iranian American son, trying to understand a father both tender and violent, and struggling with his own emerging sexuality. Key themes of immigration and queerness for readers today. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from June 5, 2023
Khabushani’s beautiful debut centers on K, an Iranian American boy who comes of age in 1990s and 2000s Los Angeles with his parents and two older brothers. His unemployed father, Baba, sees “a light” in K’s eyes, which Baba takes to mean that K is destined for great things. But K, who narrates, is less certain about the direction of his life or where he belongs. Through a series of impressionistic episodes, such as the time he searched the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese for lost coins, K recounts his efforts to “become the American boy I want to be.” Then Baba takes his sons back to Iran, where he says, “Things will be better for us.” They are not—especially when Baba sexually abuses K. After returning home to L.A., without Baba, K, now in middle school, imagines acting on his desires for his neighbor Johnny. As the years pass and his older brothers find their paths in life, K gets a job at McDonald’s, where “the must of potatoes and sweat is permanently wedged into the tiles of the walls.” After 9/11, K feels the wrath of Islamophobia. Khabushani renders K’s experiences in poignant vignettes that speak to the young boy’s sensitivity as he dreams of a better, albeit uncertain future. This heartrending tale will stay with readers.
July 1, 2023
An Iranian American boy comes of age in 1990s Los Angeles. Khabushani's novel follows several years in the life of narrator K, who is 9 when the book opens in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. He's the youngest of three brothers: "I'm getting closer to Justin's ten and to Shawn's twelve." It's the boys' father who proves to be the most disruptive element in their lives: He gambles and has a tendency to turn violent when one of his children misbehaves. Khabushani creates a memorably lived-in world here, from K's desire to win a spelling bee so as not to have to wear hand-me-down shirts to references to K's relatives living in Iran. The boys' father is haunted by regrets of his own, including a now-deceased college friend. Unfortunately, he's channeled those regrets into resentment--"Baba turns to me before starting the ignition and tells me he should have never allowed [Maman] to enroll in school, that he should have never brought her to this country"--and unsettling treatment of his children. When he takes the children to Iran one summer, things come to a head in an especially harrowing scene of abuse. The boys return to Los Angeles while their father does not, and the novel's second half follows them forward in time as K explores his own sexuality and the family struggles with Islamophobia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which prompt one of K's brothers to enlist. Khabushani's novel ends on an elliptical note, and at times this feels like the prologue to a much longer work. But it also features its own compelling momentum. Movingly balances emotional realism with a tactile eye for details.
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July 1, 2023
An Iranian American teen confronts divisions within his family and his identity. Growing up in a stucco-walled apartment in the San Fernando Valley, our narrator, K, plays basketball with his brothers, swims in the surf, and checks his armpits for signs of puberty. But K's idyllic SoCal boyhood and burgeoning intimacy with his best friend, Johnny, are cut short when K's mercurial father takes his sons back to Iran after a falling out with the boys' long-suffering mother. In Isfahan, K learns perspective on his heritage--"Iran's long history of beauty and art but its darkness, too."--and also discovers the depths of his father's cruelty. When K eventually returns to the U.S., it's not the same; post-9/11, hateful new graffiti appears in the old neighborhood. If K belongs anywhere, it may be with his beloved Johnny, but their relationship can only succeed if K can find peace within his fractured family. Khabushani's debut relates a difficult coming-of-age tale with a focus on the physicality of male bodies, their vulnerability and resilience.
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