He plays with his expression and struggles with the intersection between his queerness and his culture.
Darius is newly out, and he’s figuring out what that means. There wasn’t much ambiguity then, and there’s none now. I wrote in my review of Darius the Great is Not Okay that, while Darius’ sexuality is never stated baldly, it would a very clueless, very heteronormative reader to not see that Darius is queer. He’s more secure in himself, but he is still exploring and the main focus of the sequel is Darius’ sexuality and the way he expresses it. In Darius the Great Deserves Better, Darius has returned home having connected to that side of the family and to his father, from whom he had also felt distant. Because he was never immersed in his mother’s culture, he feels isolated from it and the first novel takes him to his mother’s childhood home to meet her family and explore that long-unexpressed part of himself. Darius the Great is Not Okay is primarily about Darius connecting with his heritage: his mother is Persian and his father is white. Khorram’s character work is extraordinary, and he does a particularly great job of presenting Darius as a three-dimensional character even as he focuses on certain elements of his identity. He’s the sort of character you want to read about and the sort of person you’d want to befriend. I loved him in his first appearance, and I continue to love him in the second. But this new, improved existence is still not perfect: Laleh is struggling at school, the family has fallen on hard times, Stephen’s depression rears its head, Sohrab goes suddenly radio silent, and Darius’ friendship with his teammate and one-time bully Chip has become very complicated. Although he’s still the target of some racist and homophobic bullying, things are overall much better: he has mended his previously distant relationship with his father, he regularly videochats with his best friend Sohrab, he is on the varsity soccer team and his teammates have embraced him in a way he’s never experienced before, he’s landed a coveted internship at Rose City Teas, and he has his first ever boyfriend. Home from his life-changing trip to Iran, Darius is getting used to the new status quo. So when I found out that it has a newly released sequel, I was excited. For about a year now, it’s been the standard by which I’ve been judging contemporary YA fiction.
Darius the Great is Not Okayby Adib Khorram is a fantastic novel.
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