Perfect Iranian girls are straight A students, always polite, and grow up to marry respectable Iranian boys. But it’s the San Fernando Valley in 1996, and Rana Joon is far from perfect—she smokes weed and loves Tupac, and she has a secret: she likes girls.
As if that weren’t enough, her best friend, Louie—the one who knew her secret and encouraged her to live in the moment—died almost a year ago, and she’s still having trouble processing her grief. To honor him, Rana enters the rap battle he dreamed of competing in, even though she’s terrified of public speaking.
Rana Joon and the One and Only Now is a novel about grief. As many novels about grief are, it is also about hope.
Rana needs to build a place for herself, and since the death of her best friend Louie a year ago − a death that she does not believe was an accident, to be clear −, she’s been spiraling.
She doesn’t like men, but screws Louie’s brother just to feel something. She has crippling social anxiety and she signs up for a rap battle. She has a crush on the wonderful Yasaman, but acts in all the wrong ways. She lies to her parents − but then again, when her dad is around, nothing goes her way if she doesn’t lie. And to be fair, the last time she tried to be honest with her mom, her mom casually dropped that she could never survive having a gay child and then reminded her that she’d never find a husband if she kept eating fries.
Rana is not like her brother, the golden child with the golden penis, who has a white girlfriend, waxes his eyebrows and bleaches the tip of his hair (it is, after all, 1996 in Los Angeles). Rana doesn’t connect with him, or with anyone except for her (other) best friend, Naz, who gets her in all kinds of mischief.
Naz is the best character in the novel in my opinion − she goes to the mosque sometimes (doing research on how she can prove to her parents that she should not be shipped to Afghanistan to marry a cousin) and pretends to go to the mosque often (to get drunk and give blowjobs to the boy she likes this week, unapologetically and enthusiastically). Listen, I love her. She’s perfect in every single way. I want a series of ten novels about her, okay?
In general, the side characters are what make this story a good one. Not that I have anything against Rana, she’s cool, but starting with her parents and Naz and Louie, who is an entire character despite dying before the story even begins, I want half a dozen spinoffs from this novel.
Special shoutouts for the poetry in this book for actually being good − that’s a rare sight.
Also, one note − while this is a high school story, the themes are heavy and I would probably not recommend this to a 15 year old. End of high school is a good time for starting to read it, I guess?
Content warnings include homophobia (including outing and homophobia from a parent), fatphobia and food monitoring from Rana’s mom, grief, misogyny, suicide and the death of Tupac.
💬
Alex