Thorndike Press large print striving reader collection.

Winner of the 2021 Michael L. Printz Award

Twelve-year-old Iranian refugee Khosrou moves to Oklahoma where he goes by Daniel and models himself after the legendary storyteller Scheherazade as he weaves tales that reflect his perseverance and reinvention

At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much. But Khosrou's stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy, and further back to the fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the Jasmine-scented city of Isfahan. -- adapted from jacket, regular print edition