Unbecoming

by Seema Yasmin

Overview

Two Muslim teens in Texas fight for access to abortion while one harbors a painful secret in this near-future speculative novel “with sparkling humor and warmth” (Booklist, starred review) that’s perfect for fans of Unpregnant.

In a not-too-distant America, abortions are prosecuted and the right to choose is no longer an option. But best friends Laylah and Noor want to change the world. After graduating high school, they’ll become an OBGYN and a journalist, but in the meantime, they’re working on an illegal guide to abortion in Texas.

In response to the unfair laws, underground networks of clinics have sprung up, but the good fight has gotten even more precarious as it becomes harder to secure safe medication and supplies. Both Laylah and Noor are passionate about getting their guide completed so it can help those in need, but Laylah treats their project with an urgency Noor doesn’t understand—that may have something to do with the strange goings-on between their mosque and a local politician.

Fighting for what they believe in may involve even more obstacles than they bargained for, but the two best friends will continue as they always have: together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665938440
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	07/09/2024
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award–winning journalist who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, medical doctor, professor, and poet. She attended medical school at Cambridge University and worked as a disease detective for the US federal government’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. She currently teaches storytelling at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is a regular contributor to CNN, Self, and Scientific American, among others.

Read an Excerpt

1. Laylah

I CAN HEAR them whispering about me. The nurse and the doctor. They look at me and they think they know me.

What they see:

Brown face.

Lilac hijaab.

Pierced nose.

What they think:

Naïve.

Exotic.

Oppressed.

All they know are stereotypes pieced together from news headlines. Stories of ISIS brides and housewives, arranged marriages and girls controlled by other people. I am none of those things.

The nurse stares at me, her blond dreadlocks piled high on her small head like a bird’s nest. I think of Asma, who repeats the Texan mantra “The taller the hair, the closer to God” any time she peels back her scarf at a girls-only mosque event to reveal a bouncy, back-combed blowout or a shiny updo that somehow survived the hijaab-covered commute to the Richardson Islamic Cultural Center without displacing a single strand of that perfect brown hair. Miraculous.

If Asma were here, she would sneer at this nurse and attack her nest of matted hair with a detangling spray and brush. Then she would sneer at me for landing myself in this haraamy mess. How could anyone who calls me their role model do this to themselves? You’re supposed to be a representative of the RICC’s youth leadership program, Laylah. I was thinking of promoting you to head volunteer! I imagine her chastising me as she lifts the oversized Fendi sunglasses off her nose to reveal liquid eyeliner winged at a precise forty-five-degree angle.

Jesus H. Christ. If Asma were here, my life really would be over. How will I ever look her in the face?

The nurse looks down at her iPad, the edges of her unblended blue eyeshadow on display. She swipes the screen, looks at me, and looks back at the iPad as if none of this makes sense, which it doesn’t. The Laylah Life Plan (LLP) does not include lying in the back of a Tito’s Tacos food truck converted into a mobile clinic at the far end of an old Walmart parking lot off the George Bush Turnpike with my izzat puddled on the floor around a box labeled meat-tenderizing powders, my shirt pulled up to my bra, and my jeans around my knees while two White women prepare to poke around my private parts.

“Feel your butt go numb on an ice-cold metal gurney” is nowhere to be found on pages two to fourteen of the LLP. Not between “Achievement #4: Write the most inclusive, straightforward, and helpful guide for Texas teens on how to get a safe abortion since Texas made abortion beyond illegal” and “Achievement #11: Get into Brown University’s Liberal Medical Education Program,” which takes you straight from an undergraduate program into medical school. And absolutely nowhere before or after “Achievement #16: Get into a fellowship program to train in emergency obstetrics” does it say that I should squat in the corner of a food truck and try to angle my pitiful stream of pee into a plastic cup. “Sorry, we don’t have a toilet fitted yet,” the doctor had said a few minutes ago, turning her back while I closed my eyes and pictured waterfalls.

Everything happening right now is extremely anti–Laylah Life Plan.

The nurse flings a pink curtain across a rail and splits the tiny truck into halves. I’m stuck in the half with a cold, metal “bed.” A silver ventilation hood teeters from the opposite wall as if it might come crashing to the floor at any minute. Beneath it, a mounted rack is jammed with a box of latex gloves where I imagine there used to be bottles of red and green taco sauces.

The nurse and doctor stand on the other side of the pink curtain in the part of the truck they have tried to kit out like a medical office. The whole place smells less like iodine and bleach and more like chimichurri and carne asada. Bless their hearts.

Oh. My. God. They’re whispering about me, again, as if I can’t hear them! As if this cutesy curtain can block out the stupid shit they’re getting wrong.

Voice 1: “Yes. She is seventeen, barely. Do you think she’s really pregnant?” [I think that’s the nurse.]

Voice 2: “Run the test again.” [That must be the doctor. She pressed her icy fingers into my stomach two minutes ago, when I was writhing beneath a white paper sheet as thin as a dupatta. She smelled of dry shampoo and coffee. I focused on her blond highlights while she poked her icicle fingers into my groin. I gritted my teeth and squinted at the two-inch black roots ruining an otherwise decent haircut. She needs a touch-up ASAP. (Yes, I notice these things, even when my throat tastes like melted batteries and the ceiling is spinning in circles.)]

Nurse: “She wears that headscarf thing.”

Doctor: “But she says she’s pregnant.”

Nurse: “Do you think she’s married?”

Doctor: “I thought you said she was seventeen?”

Nurse: “She could be one of those child brides! I heard about them when I was serving in the Peace Corps in Darfur and then I saw this thing the other night on 60 Minutes. They said that Pakistani girls in New Jersey—right here in America!—are being married off to old men and having twelve babies before they turn thirty.”

[I am not Pakistani, at no point have I said I am Pakistani, and I am definitely not a “child bride” pushing out a dozen babies while preparing for med school essays and getting a four-year head start on the MCAT.]

Doctor: “Focus, Ali. It’s probably just period pain. You know how freaked out the kids get these days. Dip her urine sample again, just to be sure. She did say the pain radiates to the left iliac fossa, so we need to quickly rule out two things. One, pregnancy...”

Nurse Ali: “And they tie the girls to these tiny beds in the basement that are really just a mattress and they make them pop out baby after baby and then they do this thing where...”

Doctor: “And two, possible ectopic pregnancy.”

Nurse Ali: “Where these old women go to the houses to deliver the babies because they have to hide the child brides from the medical system because they’re all illegal and...”

Doctor: “Never mind. I’ll dip the urine. Grab the ultrasound machine. See if it’s working today.”

My two-ton MCAT textbook jammed with thousands of satisfying medical school prep questions pokes out of my tote bag. I hope the doctor spotted it earlier. Maybe she saw it and now understands that 1) I can comprehend that two lines on a damned pregnancy test means my life is over, and 2) I am not just Another Silly Girl who wound up desperately seeking help in the back of a truck because of One Bad Decision. My book should signal to her that I am driven, ambitious, and intellectual. I may have slipped up once but I plan on remedying this mess and I insist on Going Places. Okay?

I reach for the book and lug it onto my lap. Its heaviness on my thighs feels like one of my little brother’s weighted blankets. I open it to a random page, the familiar sentences a comforting antidote to the traitorous, disloyal organs clenching and twisting deep inside me. I flick past neon-green, yellow, and orange color-coded highlights, peel away a pink Post-it note, and take my first deep breath in hours.

Editorial Reviews

"...relevant look at the ingenuity, tenacity, and hope of two teens fighting for their right to choose."

6/24/2024 - Publishers Weekly

"Laylah and Noor are strong characters with clear goals and aspirations; Yasmin weaves in their opinions on Islam and relationships, emphasizing the importance of being able to make the choices that affect one’s life."

6/1/24 - Kirkus Reviews

"Yasmin leavens the story with sparkling humor and warmth. Laylah and Noor are the stars of the novel, but the well-rounded secondary characters are not far behind. This is a smart and beautifully written book, with a plot pulled from the front page of any newspaper."

4/15/24 - STARRED REVIEW Booklist

2024-05-04
Two Muslim high schoolers seek to help other teens access safe abortions in this fiction debut by medical doctor and journalist Yasmin.

In a Texas where abortion is illegal and anyone attempting to get one (or help someone else get one) risks imprisonment, best friends Laylah Khan and Noor Awad are determined to write an “inclusive, straightforward, and helpful guide” for teens who need to find an abortion clinic. Indian American Laylah, who’s a practicing Muslim, wants to go to medical school and specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. Palestinian American Noor wants to become a journalist; she identifies as pansexual and culturally Muslim. Alternating chapters from the girls’ points of view capture their thoughts and emotions as they each hide something from each other. The pace escalates toward the end as the friends open up to one another. Laylah reads about her grandmother’s personal experience with a compulsory sterilization program in Indira Gandhi’s India that was pushed by the U.S.—information that offers valuable context for her family’s supportive attitudes. However, because a major plot point comes fairly late in the story, the ending feels rushed, not allowing enough space for the leads and their relationship to change and grow. Laylah and Noor are strong characters with clear goals and aspirations; Yasmin weaves in their opinions on Islam and relationships, emphasizing the importance of being able to make the choices that affect one’s life.

Timely, important subject matter; uneven execution. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews