If You Could Be Mine

Overview

Sara Farizan's novel follows Sahar, a seventeen-year-old in Tehran who has loved her best friend Nasrin since the two were children. Their relationship has unfolded quietly for years, held together by secrecy, because in Iran a romance between two girls carries the threat of violence or imprisonment. Sahar has learned to live inside that constraint, treating caution as simply part of loving Nasrin.

The fragile arrangement breaks when Nasrin's family announces she will marry a man they've chosen for her. Searching for any way to keep what she has, Sahar learns of a path the law does not forbid: because Iran recognizes gender transition as a medical remedy rather than a crime, sex reassignment surgery is both legal and state-supported, even as homosexuality remains punishable.

What follows is less a plan than a reckoning. Sahar must ask herself whether changing her body to match a legal category could ever substitute for being loved as who she actually is, and whether a future with Nasrin is worth obtaining at that cost.

A Story Shaped by Contradiction

Much of the book's power comes from the strange legal landscape it depicts, where a government that criminalizes same-sex relationships simultaneously funds and permits gender-affirming surgery. Farizan uses this real contradiction to put Sahar in an impossible position: survival within the system is available to her only by claiming an identity that isn't hers. The novel doesn't resolve this tension neatly; it asks readers to sit with the gap between what the law allows and what a person actually needs.

The book was notable on publication for centering a Iranian teenager's inner life and her relationship with her culture, family, and faith without reducing her to a symbol. Sahar's love for Nasrin is portrayed with the same ordinary intensity as any first love, even as the stakes surrounding it are extraordinary. In doing so, the novel sits alongside other coming-of-age LGBTQ fiction while distinguishing itself through its specific setting and the moral weight of its central dilemma.

Why If You Could Be Mine Has Been Challenged

A parent raising concerns about this title has typically argued that its depiction of a romantic and physical relationship between two teenage girls is inappropriate for a school library's intended age group, pointing to scenes of intimacy as evidence that the book belongs in a more restricted or adult collection. Underlying that argument is often a broader objection to a narrative that treats a same-sex teenage relationship as sympathetic and central rather than peripheral or cautionary. Other objections raised in review discussions have focused on the book's frank treatment of sexuality and gender identity more generally, with critics arguing that the subject matter is better suited to older readers or should require parental consent to access. The catalog tracks this title as challenged in 1 state and 1 school district.