Funny in Farsi

Dumas arrived in California from Iran at age seven, not speaking a word of English. Her father was an optimist of extraordinary proportions. This memoir — told in linked comic essays — is the dispatch from inside the Iranian American immigrant experience at its most human: the confusion, the adaptation, the specific humor of a family that approached every absurdity with curiosity rather than bitterness. The most accessible Iranian dispatch on the adult shelf and the one that makes the most people feel like they understand something they didn't before.