Every refugee’s story is nuanced and unique - and Shirin Amani Azari’s is no exception. I’ve read a fair amount of asylum/refugee/immigrant narratives, but surprisingly, never one set in Sweden. In fact, the Scandinavian countries are largely an enigma to me, which lead to this narrative being doubly informative by giving me a view into the country's attitudes and customs.

Azari succeeds in recalling her initial months in Sweden through her twelve-year old eyes, setting a scene so crystal clear that her bewilderment and feelings of foreignness become not just tangible, but relatable.

Through succinct prose, Azari demonstrates the complicated emotions faced by displaced children - the longing for their dangerous homelands, but relief for their safety; the emptiness and fear of leaving people behind; but knowing that for every one that joins them is a sign that their country is not getting better; the pain of their parents' disempowerment.

Though not a middle grade book, this would be an accessible reader for introducing pre-teens to the world of displacement many of their peers experience, without overwhelming them with darkness and cruelty. It is also not very long (and thus also attractive to adult readers with little time!).

If you’ve ever wondered why a country should be expected to take in displaced persons, Once Upon a Time in Uppsala might lead you to wondering, why wouldn’t a country take in those who need a soft place to land? If you are already in the camp of welcoming displaced people with open arms, this will only make you more sensitive to the fact that their struggles do not come to an end once they reach safety.

I was so excited to be approved for Once Upon a Time in Uppsala. I love to read about differences in cultures and adapting accordingly. Unfortunately, the writing was like the of a high school paper. I would keep the story, but have a ghost writer that can bring this story to life.

This interesting memoir relates the story of an Iranian family who fled the Iran-Iraq War in the mid 1980s. The author, Shirin Amani Azari, describes her initial experiences with culture and climate shock before jumping to the period wherein she has married and moved to England.
Azari describes the otherworldly experience of moving from Iran to a winter wonderland with a starkly different culture as a step through the Professor’s wardrobe in Narnia. Instead of a White Witch, they were in a country where they met kindness and support. The freedoms they found had an unsettling quality. Azari says that freedom of thought and speech were torturous coming from a world that controlled such things. It took a while to learn a new way of being.

This story is told from the point of view of twelve-year-old Shirin, but the narrative voice is refined and the point of view mature, an adult contemplating her past through the lens of time and reflection. This overlay gives the twelve-year-old voice a stilted quality, but Azari’s goal to share the immigrant experience and the pain of leaving family and her home country behind is carried through and well done.

Shirin Amani Azari arrived in Sweden, a country at peace for more than one hundred years in January 1985. She was twelve, a child from Iran, a victim of the war between Iran and Iraq.
Shirin vows she wrote this memoir to help raise awareness of the silent suffering of immigrant children across the world. I would like to think that writing about her early life in Sweden was cathartic.
This is a book about the power of the human survival instinct, about heroism and the mysterious ways in which the universe acts. It is an emotional story of a stranger in a strange land learning to call that place home.

Once Upon a Time in Uppsala is a story beautifully told and an important one to read. When we are introduced to Shirin and her family she is a pre-teen uprooted from Iran and relocated to Uppsala with her mother and brother, having left her father and other extended family behind. I visited Uppsala last summer and was able to clearly picture the events and settings Anzari described and appreciate how drastically different their new climate and surroundings must have been from her homeland.

Anzari takes the reader along as she navigated situations common to children of her age, all of which had an additional layer of complication created by language acquisition, separation and the need for assimilation. At times she enhanced these stories with traditional folk tales, which led to a deeper appreciation of the tradition and culture she left behind. Overall, I think a wide variety of readers will find this book helpful in understanding the impact immigration and displacement have on children and families and hopefully result in more people opening their hearts to those in situations such as Anzari and her family.

Winter, 1985: Shirin Azari and her mother and brother are new to Uppsala, Sweden, where they have fled to escape the war in Iran. Everything is different: the cold outside makes it impossible to keep plans; people stand far apart when they talk; nobody makes eye contact; music is listened to as a matter of enjoyment rather than subversion; people sunbathe naked in the park in summer. At twelve, Azari knows that the only way to handle this is to hold on to the knowledge that they will be going home. Any day now. Just as soon as the war is over.

"Once Upon a Time in Uppsala" takes the reader through Azari's first year in Sweden—learning the language, standing up to playground bullies, adjusting to Swedish culture but also to the understanding that home as she knew it is not really there anymore. It's a gradual shift but a natural one, aided by her new best friend Turkan (recently arrived from Turkey) and by her burgeoning confidence in Swedish.

Interspersed throughout the story are folk tales, some from Iran and some from Sweden and some of unknown origin. As with any folk tales, some have clear morals (for the most part not directly connected to Azari's family) while others seem like pleasant tales to tell a child; worked into this memoir, they're lovely and help to keep Iran alive in the story even as Azari becomes more comfortable in Sweden. It occurred to me, reading this, that most of the folk tales I know either come from Western countries or have been Westernized, and I'd love to see more of these Persian folk tales collected in a volume.

This makes for a quick read and gives a solid sense of what it was to be an immigrant/refugee child in Sweden in the 80s. I imagine that a lot of it still holds true today—easier communication with people back home, thanks to the Internet, but the same struggles to fit in and yearnings for home. This would be a valuable read both for young refugees in foreign lands and for their local peers.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.