It Ain't So Awful, Falafel

 It Ain't So Awful, Falafel

By Firoozeh Dumas

Being an Iranian in late 1970s Newport Beach, CA, was no easy task for middle-schooler Zomorod Yousefzadeh. And then the Iranian Revolution hit. That's pretty much the plot of this YA novel. The summer before her 7th-grade year, Zomorod move to this well-to-do enclave, and all she wants to do is to fit in. She even adopts the name Cindy, hoping this nod to Americaness will endear her to her classmates. It works, kind of. But when Iranian revolutionaries take Americans hostage, there is not much "Cindy" can do. Her father loses his job, and the family is on the brink of having to move back to a homeland that, from what they have seen on tv, looks like a foreign country.

The highlight of this book is Cindy's first-person narration. She feels real -- likely because the book is a loosely fictionalized account of the author's own life. The story is quite funny and a quick read. It would be funnier if the anti-Middle Eastern sentiment expressed then didn't resonate so loudly today. 

The Pull of the Stars

 The Pull of the Stars

By Emma Donoghue

My first pandemic book about a pandemic! This novel, set during the height of the Spanish Flu, follows a

nurse in the maternity ward of a Dublin hospital over the course of two days. The nurse, Julia Power, does all she can to keep infected mothers and their children alive over the course of her two-hour shifts. Each birth gives a little insight into this world, particularly the babies born to unmarried fathers who will be forced to labor for years at homes run by nuns in exchange for shelter from the scorn that might accompany them were they on their own. But also the precariousness of life at the time. Death during childbirth was common, as the book makes all too clear. There are bright spots, though. One is in the form of Dr. Kathleen Lynn, a republican involved in the Easter Uprising, whose firm commitment to social justice and equally firm rejection of societal norms serves as inspiration for Julia to break away from her country's rigid, Catholic set of expectations. It seems that the dual tragedies of World War I and the pandemic were a catalyst for some positive change.

It remains to be seen, of course, what changes our current pandemic will bring. The main takeaway for me, though, was that whatever that fate, we are very lucky to live now. I recently made an appointment for my first dose of the COVID vaccine. To think -- in just about a year's time, we were able to develop a vaccine to inoculate millions of people. It is quite an achievement, though one we might not fully appreciate until this whole thing is over.