Review: Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram

ARC provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

I'm just going to start with the fact that I really loved reading this book. I just love the way Khorram writes, specifically the way he writes just so completely moves me; he is excellent at making the reader feel the emotions he wants them to.

Darius the Great Deserves Better is the sequel to Darius the Great Is Not Okay, a book I loved earlier this year. Maybe you could read book two without reading book one, but I don’t think you should. This book starts a few months after Darius returns with his family from their trip to Iran. Darius is on the soccer team, has a boyfriend, works at Rose City Teas, his dream job, and is finally making friends at school. In addition to all this seemingly positive stuff, his parents are working way more because of the expense of the Iran trip, his sister is dealing with racism for the first time she has even noticed, his grandfather is still dying, and Darius is still figuring out how exactly to navigate in the world as himself. I am doing a poor job explaining the book; it really is an excellent slice of life character book. Those are hard to encapsulate.

I could probably try to nitpick and find something I didn’t like about this book, but that would be disingenuous. I really liked this book.

My favorite thing about book one was also my favorite thing about book two, the family relationships. I loved that we met Darius’ other grandparents, his Grandma and Oma, in this book. I had completely forgotten that Darius had a trans grandparent, and overall just really love the way this book has a diversity of different queer identities throughout. I liked the way his relationships with his grandmothers were different than his relationships with his mother's parents. Their story was so different, and Khorram did such an excellent job adding nuance to the dynamics on this side of the family as well. I loved that we got to explore deeper into Darius and Laleh’s, his little sister, relationship. The author also showed how his relationship with his father had continued to be positive while giving more time to the way he was now interacting with his mother. Basically, I just want to read books about families written by Khorram for the rest of my life. He does the best job.

I also really loved the friendships in this book. He wrote about so many different kinds of friendships and the different levels of complexity that come with different friend dynamics. The romantic relationship in this book was also very well done, it was a really good portrayal of a first romantic relationship. One of the many things Darius is trying to figure out is if he wants to have sex with his boyfriend, which is a narrative I have never seen with a male protagonist.

I also loved the themes of this book. Darius the Great Deserves Better is a perfect title for this book; it really is about Darius grappling with what he deserves from his family, friends, boyfriend, and just out of life. I thought it was excellently done. Also, I cried like four times.

Also, very weirdly for a contemporary series, I love book two just the same as I love book one.

I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would recommend this book to so many people; clearly, I love it. If you like character-focused books, you really should jump into this series, if you want books full of queer characters, if you want to read about mixed-race characters trying to figure out how to operate in two different cultures, and if you just wanna read about this excellent nerd and maybe cry a little, you should pick up this series.