Hi everyone! I’m so excited to be part of the blog tour for Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram. I read and really loved this wonderful debut novel and I can’t wait for more people to discover it. I’m also really thrilled to be sharing a playlist for the book made by the author!
About the Book
Releasing August 28th 2018 by Dial Books for Young Readers
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Darius doesn’t think he’ll ever be enough, in America or in Iran.
Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He’s a Fractional Persian–half, his mom’s side–and his first-ever trip to Iran is about to change his life.
Darius has never really fit in at home in Portland, and he just knows things are going to be the same in Iran. His clinical depression doesn’t exactly help matters, and trying to explain his medication to his grandparents only makes things harder. Then Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door, and everything changes. Sohrab introduces Darius to all of his favorite things–mint syrup and the soccer field and a secret rooftop overlooking the city’s skyline. He gets Darius an Iranian National Football Team jersey that makes him feel like a True Persian for the first time. And he understands that sometimes, friends don’t have to talk. Sohrab calls him Darioush–the original Persian version of his name–and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he’s Darioush to Sohrab.
The Playlist by Adib Khorram
I’ve never been much of a playlist person. I’ve been writing to music ever since I did NaNoWriMo a few years back (it helped me focus and drown out distractions), but I’ve always listened to whole albums.
Working on DARIUS was no different. My “playlist” was a series of four albums in sequence.
Three of them were by Young the Giant. My favorite of them, Home of the Strange, was released while I was working on revisions, and it was kind of eerily perfect in its themes: immigration, friendship, love, that feeling of being caught between two different extremes.
The fourth album I listened to was The Best of Simon and Garfunkel, which I listened to whenever I was writing about Darius and his dad. A strange choice, you may think, but when I was growing up, my own father had a cassette tape of The Best of Simon and Garfunkel that he always played in the car when he was driving, so hearing those songs puts me back in the mind of relating to my own father as a boy, rather than a grown man.
All that being said, I certainly have favorite songs from those albums, so here are my top eight! If you listen carefully, you can probably find a little bit of Darius in each of them.
From Young the Giant: “My Body” and “Cough Syrup”
From Mind Over Matter: “Crystallized” and “Mind Over Matter”
From Home of the Strange: “Titus Was Born” and “Repeat”
From The Best of Simon and Garfunkel: “The Sound of Silence” and “The Boxer”
And, as a bonus song, there’s a particular song Darius references that he dances to at his family’s Nowruz party. Though it’s not named in the book, the one I had in mind was Bijan Mortazavi’s “Ronak.”
About the Author
Adib Khorram is an author, a graphic designer, and a tea enthusiast. If he’s not writing (or at his day job), you can probably find him trying to get his 100 yard Freestyle under a minute, or learning to do a Lutz Jump. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where people don’t usually talk about themselves in the third person. You can find him on Twitter (@adibkhorram), Instagram (@adibkhorram), or on the web at adibkhorram.com.
What did you think of Khorram’s playlist? Are you excited for Darius the Great is Not Okay? Don’t forget to check it out when it comes out on August 28th!
If I was going to write to music Simon and Garfunkle would be it, although I confess I like to listen to silence when I write and every other time.