Add If You Could Be Mine to the top of your to-read pile this summer . Sara Farizan is setting the stage for a new kind of YA novel.
Mark Karlsberg / Studio Eleven
Algonquin Books
Sara Farizan's novel If You Could Be Mine, set in Tehran, Iran, follows two teenage girls, booky and serious Sahar, and her best friend, fashionable and aloof, Nasrin, navigating their attraction to each other without a blueprint for the journey.
"I need an answer from you. Please, don't treat me like I'm silly girl, because we're too old for that. If I were a man, would you be with me? Would you leave him for me?" Sahar pleads with Nasrin during an argument. Playing with a strand of Sahar's hair while contemplating a response, Nasrin offers: "You wouldn't look so bad with a beard."
What sets Farizan apart from many of her contemporaries is her ability to create a world where an Iranian teenage girl falling in love with another Iranian teenage girl doesn't seem more outlandish than a human loving a vampire. Her success as a novelist epitomizes many of the ideas Daniel Josè Older examines in his essay "Diversity Is Not Enough." If You Could Be Mine exists in a book culture described by Older as much: "The publishing industry looks a lot like these best-selling teenage dystopias: white and full of people destroying each other to survive." Farizan's voice, bubbly and thoughtful, raises just a bit when I ask her about diversity in YA novels.
"I don't want to touch the holiness that is Harry Potter because the fans love it, and it's wonderful, but I do think it would make such a difference, not just to have a token minority character. None of that. Even a fleshed out character. I'm just so sick of token minority characters. It's a disservice to everybody."
The Amma character in Beautiful Creatures is one example of this tokenism. An older African-American woman with magical powers mysteriously connected to her slave ancestors, Amma is provided little backstory that doesn't connect directly with the lead white male character, Ethan. Her character plays heavily into the magical negro trope, and she eventually trades her own life for Ethan's. It is true that in worlds written to include dystopia, dragons, and witches, there are some authors who still can't imagine an LGBT person or person of color as a central character.
When asked if she's written about any WOC (wizards of color), Farizan laughs, "I can't write wizards. I wish I could."