Americanized

I don't read a lot of YA nonfiction for some reason (it also seems like there's not that much YA nonfiction, though I could just not be paying attention), but I really enjoyed this! I picked it up as part of library summer reading bingo - one of the squares is “read a book on the 2019 Topaz List,” which I'd never heard of, but is a list by the Texas Library Association of recommended nonfiction books (here's the 2019 list: https://txla.org/news/2019-texas-topaz-nonfiction-reading-list/). Americanized was a unanimous selection and I'd already put it on my Goodreads TBR, so I checked it out, and I'm so glad I did! Sara has such a fun, engaging voice as a writer, and I learned a lot about Iranian/Persian culture and life as a secretly undocumented person without ever feeling condescended to. The book kind of skips all over, and is more of a memoir in essays than a strict chronological one, which could get kind of confusing, but didn't get in the way of my enjoyment of it. Sara was a little bit older than me, though not by much, and I enjoyed the flashback to growing up in the late 90's. Basically, this book was a lot of fun and Sara seems like she'd be a great person to hang out with over a glass of wine and some Persian food.