Only This Beautiful Moment
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Stonewall Book Award Winner * A Best Book of the Year from the Guardian, ALA Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage From the award–winning author of Like a Love Story comes a sweeping story of three generations of boys in the same Iranian family. Perfect for fans of Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Darius the Great Is Not Okay.
2019. Moud is an out gay teen living in Los Angeles with his distant father, Saeed. When Moud gets the news that his grandfather in Iran is dying, he accompanies his dad to Tehran, where the revelation of family secrets will force Moud into a new understanding of his history, his culture, and himself.
1978. Saeed is an engineering student with a promising future ahead of him in Tehran. But when his parents discover his involvement in the country’s burgeoning revolution, they send him to safety in America, a country Saeed despises. And even worse—he’s forced to live with the American grandmother he never knew existed.
1939. Bobby, the son of a calculating Hollywood stage mother, lands a coveted MGM studio contract. But the fairy-tale world of glamour he’s thrust into has a dark side.
Set against the backdrop of Tehran and Los Angeles, this tale of intergenerational trauma and love is an ode to the fragile bonds of family, the hidden secrets of history, and all the beautiful moments that make us who we are today.
A CCBC 2024 Choices for the Fiction for Young Adult category!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nazemian (The Chandler Legacies) combines myriad interconnected narratives spanning three generations of an Iranian family in this ambitious read. In 2019, 17-year-old Mahmoud Jafarzadeh, who is queer, is visiting Tehran from Los Angeles for the first time to spend time with grandfather Baba, who is terminally ill. When Moud confides his complicated feelings about his family and culture to his white boyfriend Shane, he claims that Moud is "defending a regime that wants you dead." In a 1978-set plotline occurring during the Iranian Revolution, 18-year-old student activist Saeed, Moud's father, falls for Shirin, a fellow protestor. But Saeed's parents, fearful for his life, send him to America to complete his education away from the tumult. And in 1939 Hollywood, Moud's Baba, 17-year-old Bobby, yearns to tell his Mexican American best friend Vicente that he loves him. The day he plucks up the courage, Bobby's overbearing stage mother sweeps him away for a once-in-a-lifetime film opportunity that drastically changes the course of his life. Via the trio's intimately realized alternating perspectives, Nazemian paints a transcendent and complex portrait of generational grief and self-discovery, expertly interweaving the boys' individual experiences with homophobia, racism, and U.S.-Iranian relations to deliver a touching family drama. Ages 13–up.
