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It Ain't So Awful, Falafel
Oct. 18th, 2018 07:25 pmIt Ain't So Awful, Falafel, Firoozeh Dumas. Middlegrade semiautobiography about an Iranian girl living in Southern California in the late 1970s, while the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis happen and complicate her life. I liked the emotional range in this, from pretty funny to really serious, and found it a fast-paced, compelling read. And I think the perspective on what it's like to be an immigrant in the US from a country not at peace with the US is really relevant and valuable for US-born kids to think about. MCBA book, not sure where I would rank it, hrm.
Personally, this was a trip for me in certain overlaps with my own childhood - I'm about ten years younger than the characters here and from a different city, but I almost went to the Girl Scout camp on Catalina that they go to (I think in the end I opted for a different one - the worst fact-checking error I noticed in this book is that SoCal Girl Scouts don't learn to identify poison ivy, they learn to identify poison oak), I was in a Girl Scout troop with two Iranian sisters whose family story I later became retroactively curious about, and, unfortunately, I remember the casual anti-Iranian racism that was still floating around the playground ten years later (maybe not as bad as during the hostage crisis, but probably heightened by Iran-Contra?). Some ugly alternate words to the "Sylvanian families" jingle about "Iranian families" spring to mind. (My recollection of the state of racism in my particular demographic niche in the late 80s was that anti-black racism was understood to be Wrong and Not Okay but that "jokes" against certain foreign nationalities were fairly common (Iranian, Chinese and Japanese, off the top of my head). I would like to think that this has gotten better but I shudder to think what charming rhymes and jingles are passed around by little white children here in the Latin@ ethnic cleansing era.) Anyways, bravo to all the authors trying to do the hard work of writing all the perspectives whose stories weren't being listened to in the eras they're set in.
Content note for animal harm.
Personally, this was a trip for me in certain overlaps with my own childhood - I'm about ten years younger than the characters here and from a different city, but I almost went to the Girl Scout camp on Catalina that they go to (I think in the end I opted for a different one - the worst fact-checking error I noticed in this book is that SoCal Girl Scouts don't learn to identify poison ivy, they learn to identify poison oak), I was in a Girl Scout troop with two Iranian sisters whose family story I later became retroactively curious about, and, unfortunately, I remember the casual anti-Iranian racism that was still floating around the playground ten years later (maybe not as bad as during the hostage crisis, but probably heightened by Iran-Contra?). Some ugly alternate words to the "Sylvanian families" jingle about "Iranian families" spring to mind. (My recollection of the state of racism in my particular demographic niche in the late 80s was that anti-black racism was understood to be Wrong and Not Okay but that "jokes" against certain foreign nationalities were fairly common (Iranian, Chinese and Japanese, off the top of my head). I would like to think that this has gotten better but I shudder to think what charming rhymes and jingles are passed around by little white children here in the Latin@ ethnic cleansing era.) Anyways, bravo to all the authors trying to do the hard work of writing all the perspectives whose stories weren't being listened to in the eras they're set in.
Content note for animal harm.
