Meet Me in Mumbai
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A novel in two acts - told eighteen years apart - gives voice to both mother (Ayesha) and daughter (Mira) after an unplanned teen pregnancy led Ayesha to place Mira up for adoption.
Coming to the US to study, Ayesha is swept up in a whirlwind romance with Suresh – an Indian boy who reminds her of home. Mere months away from starting university, she falls pregnant and finds herself alone. She makes the difficult decision to hide her pregnancy and put her daughter up for adoption, before returning to India.
Years later, seventeen-year-old Mira Fuller-Jensen has had a comfortable childhood but has never felt quite like she fit in their majority white community. All she knows is that her mums adopted her when she was born and that her biological mother was a student who went back to India. When she comes across letters addressed to her from her birth mother, she sees a way to finally capture that feeling of belonging.
Her mother writes that if Mira can forgive her for having to give her up, she should find a way to travel to India for her eighteenth birthday and meet her. Mira knows she'll always regret it if she doesn't go. But is she actually ready for what she will learn?
* Perfect for fans of Sabina Khan's other books Zara Hossain is Here and The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali
* Deals with relatable teen issues and portrays the intersection of teen pregnancy with Muslim and Indian culture
* Compelling dual perspectives – Ayesha is brave and loving, Mira is curious but lost and both make engaging narrators
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two Indian American teens grapple with cultural differences and the aftermath of an unplanned pregnancy in this thought-provoking novel by Khan (Zara Hossain Is Here). Eighteen-year-old Ayesha Hameed, who was born in the U.S. but raised in India, is finishing high school in the U.S. while living with her Salma Aunty and Hafeez Uncle in Bloomington, Ill. Far from her parents and feeling out of place in the predominately white town, Ayesha forms an immediate and intimate bond with Suresh, also of Indian heritage. When their relationship results in an unplanned pregnancy, Ayesha worries about jeopardizing her academic goals before eventually deciding that adoption is the right option for her. Seventeen years later, Ayesha's daughter, Mira, raised by a kind white lesbian couple, finds a box of letters that Ayesha wrote to her while pregnant. Mira effectively assumes the narrative reins, diving deep into her birth mother's past to unearth unexplored parts of her identity. Khan's sincere prose, which capably flows from Ayesha's perspective to Mira's as each navigates her own emotionally turbulent circumstances, propels this compassionate story toward a hopeful conclusion. Ages 14–up.
