review: The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War Two Story

Title: The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story
Author: Daniel Nayeri
Date: Levine Querido; Sept 2025
Main character: Babak Noori

Daniel Nayeri is an Iranian American author who left his ancestral homeland at age 7 with his family. He’s worked as a literary agent, editor, and publisher, all careers that make sense for a storyteller.

The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story is about a young boy named Babak and his younger sister, Sana, who have just become orphans in Iran during World War II when British and Russian troops invade the country. “It wasn’t’ a conquest. It was an occupation. If they hadn’t done it, Hitler would have.” (p 14) The Allies wanted to protect the Iranian oil from the Nazis.

In this new landscape, Babak and Sana work to find safety. They want to travel with the nomads whom their father used to teach, but they cannot carry their own weight with these seasonal migrants whose existence is sustained by what they can forage from the land. The children are asked to leave and these two young urban dwellers have to rely upon their knowledge of basic survival skills to get them back to the city where they started. Things soon get complicated and their safely isn’t assured. As they maneuver the terrain, they encounter Bakhtiari nomads, British troops, a Russian soldier, and a young Jewish boy, all speaking different languages with different needs and expectations. Babak becomes a teacher by incorporating letters and words to facilitate understanding between multilingual parties. The child becomes the teacher.

Give me a book that effectively aligns the setting sun, rocky paths, and grayish cold mornings to characters’ emotions, or even uses it to foreshadow events, and I’ll consider it for any award. Nayeri is good at engaging setting, and these devices works especially well in a story about land. Rich in symbolism and simply told, I’d add this historical fiction to any public, middle grade, or high school library collection.

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