Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION KHABUSHANI | 31330009373469 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Amesbury Public Library | FIC KHABUSHANI | 32114002784685 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | FICTION/KHABUSHANI | 33934004660693 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/KHABUSHANI | 31480011695993 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC KHABUSHANI | 32120001438603 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | FIC/KHABUSHANI K | 31479007636870 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC KHABUSHANI | 31481005719757 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | FIC KHA | 32124002140671 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | FIC KHA | 31548003498954 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC KHABUSHANI K | 32128004208378 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | FICTION KHABUSHANI | 32132003407569 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Topsfield Town Library | FIC KHABUSHANI | 32133002702778 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F KHABUSHANI | 31990005276949 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"[A] masterful debut . . . a novel of survival and longing and love, and in many ways a modern portrait of an artist as a young man . . . a book written for us , we Iranian Americans whom you don't often hear about." -- Porochista Khakpour, The Washington Post (Best Books of the Year)
"A triumph . . . a book of astonishing accomplishment and bravery." -- Dina Nayeri, The Guardian
Winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association * Finalist for the California Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award
An Amerie's Book Club Pick * A Phenomenal Book Club Pick
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley with his two brothers, all K wants is to be "a boy from L.A.," all American. But K--the youngest, named after a Persian king--knows there's something different about himself. Like the way he feels about his closest friend, Johnny, a longing that he can't share with anyone.
At home, K must navigate another confusing identity: that of the dutiful son of Iranian immigrants struggling to make a life for themselves in the United States. He tries to make his mother proud, live up to her ideal of a son. On Friday nights, K attends prayers at the local mosque with Baba, whose violent affections distort K's understanding of what it means to be a man and how to love.
When Baba takes the three brothers from their mother back to Iran, K finds himself in an ancestral home he barely knows. Returning to the Valley months later, K must piece together who he is, in a world that now feels as foreign to him as the one he left behind.
A stunning, tender novel of identity and belonging, I Will Greet the Sun Again tells the story of a young man lost in his own family, his own country, and his own skin. Staring down the brutality of being a queer kid and a Muslim in America, Khashayar J. Khabushani transforms personal and national pain into an unforgettable and beautifully rendered exploration of youth, love, family--and the stories that make us who we are.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
As an Iranian kid in America, my greatest nightmare was being kidnapped back to Iran. For those of us who had endured the "morality police", gruelling escapes and long asylum battles, Iran was the hell at the border of our new American lives, and later, when I met other Iranian Americans my age, I found that I wasn't alone. I Will Greet the Sun Again, Khashayar J Khabushani's tender and gut-wrenching debut novel, is a tightly constructed three-act drama exploring the long-term impact when three brothers are kidnapped to their father's Iran. Set mostly in a sun-beaten, crumbling Los Angeles apartment complex, the story grabbed me from the start, not just for its vivid characters who never stop trying, or its meticulously realised settings, but for the winking way it speaks to Iranian Americans of the author's generation, with Persian words sprinkled liberally throughout. Baba crushes his family so slowly they hardly notice it - and yet, his sons continue to love and admire him The kidnapping is a danger that looms from the first page, embodied by an abusive, narcissistic father whose failures in America threaten to destroy the family. Baba is one of the most deplorable characters I've read in years, expertly realised by an author unafraid to zoom in close. Calling himself "the best engineer in all of America", Baba refuses to work, because he's too proud to labour for someone else. He loses the family's house, gambles away his hardworking wife's earnings while preening to his sons. He buys a single burger for all three and tells them to "pay close attention and to remember what it looked like when a man was respected all across the globe". Baba crushes his family so slowly they hardly notice it. And yet, his sons continue to love and admire him, and his worst acts are written precisely and unflinchingly, in all their awful detail, without sentiment or pity. At nine, the narrator, K, is the youngest and gentlest of the brothers, who were born in LA but grow up fixated on reaffirming their Americanness. Stolen away to their father's homeland, they are as pitiless and judgmental as any American children would be: "I miss our country ¿ where we had shit to do other than pray and take naps in the middle of the day like we're in fucking preschool." And yet, a few months later when they are rescued back "home" to America and their mother, their first flex is naturally "We're real Iranians now". This struggle with identity is at the heart of the book, and subtly captured. Having attended Columbia - or so he says - Baba reveres western canonical writers and makes the boys write out pages from books he considers great literature. K's love of words is apparent early on and he promises that "when I'm older I'll get to write how I want to write, stories that aren't old or long or in English that's hard to understand. I want to write using my own rules and not the way Baba says I'm supposed to, perfect and neat." Like most Iranians writing in English, I've thought a lot about what it means to write the Persian way or the American way, or my way. I worry about having imbibed western dogmas in American MFA programmes (Khabushani earned his from Columbia). But "my way" is no shield against criticism, of which I have only small ones. The first act builds beautifully to the kidnapping; moving from dual culture struggles and everyday boyish triumphs, it is an honest and riveting dive into the nightmare. The second section in Iran releases the tension too quickly. A horrific and transformative scene unfolds, and we're back in America. In the third section, after the brothers' return from Iran, the pacing shifts and we sprint through their adolescent years and early adulthood with the trauma of what happened in Iran always one layer below the surface, a lifelong subtext to everything, though its deeper impact on K's character and identity are left dramatically unrealised, which leads to a few essayistic wrap-ups near the end. Multiple issues are jammed into those final scenes: identity in a post-9/11 world, gang and military recruitments, heartbreak, sexual awakening, queerness in an Iranian family, all in just a few pages. While the use of Persian words in an English text is part of a larger conversation about language, I'm wary of style at the expense of clarity and efficiency. Yes, there are words without English equivalent or that have crept into English (chai). Some words are just for us, his fellow Iranians: yavashaki (sneakily) or gooz (fart) are inside jokes. But do we need to give words like "yes" or "go" or "please" or "hungry" in two languages when the rest of the text assumes Farsi dialogue? What does it achieve other than to exotify the text? These are small gripes about a book of astonishing accomplishment and bravery. To transport someone so convincingly into their own worst nightmare is a tall order, and Khabushani has done it with such a widely shared bogeyman. This book is a triumph, one that will help the next generation understand our specific American childhood - how it felt to grow up with broken immigrant parents and one foot still in Iran, sitting in front of a TV in a sad apartment complex, dreaming of the good life.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.