Everything Sad is Untrue: (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri

Nayeri, D. Everything Sad is Untrue: (A True Story), (2020), Montclair, NJ: Levine Querido.

Ages 12+

I am in the midst of teaching a professional development series on how to provide services to EL/ML students in the school library and this book is what I opened the course with. Yes, Daniel’s English was excellent and his refugee experience was uniquely his, but the focus on storytelling as a means of making connections, even with so much resistance, was a great illustration about how communication isn’t just about the nuts and bolts of understanding the language, but rather it is about understanding your fellow human.
I listened to this book, rather than reading the paper copy and I had to pull over to write this nugget down - “Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.” Good grief, I am crying a little bit just retyping it. And there are so many beautiful slices of philosophy.  “Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.” This description blew my mind.

Daniel, like Schererazade, is telling his stories to me, the listener (In the book, the reader, nice touch audiobook version!) and he says, ““Dear listener, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last.  Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.” And Daniel does that for us as well. 

Finally, this book talks about faith in a way that makes it irresistible. From Daniels offhand comment, “But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.” to his deconstruction of how his mother had to give up everything for Jesus, it is powerful stuff. 

I laughed out loud so many times, and I feel a little bad that all the taglines on Amazon talk about how powerful and heartbreaking it is, because it is also hysterical in parts. 

The cover art is absolutely beautiful and might have some young reader appeal, but this strikes me as one of those middle grade books that adults absolutely adore, but that needs to be a little bit pushed on actual kids. Starry.ai did a pretty good job with an illustration ( I needed to see Mr. Sheep Sheep.) but it was no match for the glorious tornado of story.