If You Could Be Mine

Sara Farizan wrote the novel to explore what her own experience as a closeted young person might have been like if she had grown up in Iran, where she would have been unable to express her sexuality as openly as she could in the United States.

The novel won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children's/Young Adult literature and was named one of Rolling Stone's 40 Best YA Novels.

The story is told entirely through the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Sahar, which means the reader only gains insight into other characters and events through her potentially subjective or unreliable viewpoint.