This Book Won't Burn

by Samira Ahmed

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Internment comes a timely and gripping social-suspense novel about book banning, activism, and standing up for what you believe. 

After her dad abruptly abandons her family and her mom moves them a million miles from their Chicago home, Noor Khan is forced to start the last quarter of her senior year at a new school, away from everything and everyone she knows and loves.

Reeling from being uprooted and deserted, Noor is certain the key to survival is to keep her head down and make it to graduation. 

But things aren’t so simple. At school, Noor discovers hundreds of books have been labeled “obscene” or “pornographic” and are being removed from the library in accordance with a new school board policy. Even worse, virtually all the banned books are by queer and BIPOC authors. 

Noor can’t sit back and do nothing, because that goes against everything she believes in, but challenging the status quo just might put a target on her back. Can she effect change by speaking up? Or will small-town politics—and small-town love—be her downfall? 

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 384

Sample

Fire isn’t the only thing that can burn you.

Fire, at least, tells the truth. It doesn’t disguise what it is. What it can do. How it can turn everything in your life into ash in a split second. Sure, it provides heat, warmth. It’s a necessity in life. Its tiniest flicker giving the cozy vibes you want on the shortest, coldest nights during Chicago winters—the ones where your mom makes hot cocoa for the family and you snuggle under old kantha quilts watching classic Bollywood movies while snow falls. But for all its cozy comforts, a single lick of flame can scorch the entire earth.

A thin, shiny scar runs along the side of my right thumb. It’s small now, barely half an inch long. I was six years old and playing with matches. I didn’t even know what a matchbox was. But the red tips of the long wooden matches in the fancy cardboard box with a colorful illustration of a fox and squirrel on the cover attracted my inquisitive hands. I didn’t understand what would happen as I struck the match against the side of the box. A satisfying scratching noise and then a tiny whirl of flame caught and stuck to my skin. My dad answered my screams; a split second later, the flame died out.

He examined the skin, rubbing a burn ointment on it as he calmly explained to me what had happened. How close I’d come to real danger. Fat tears ran down my cheeks and plopped onto the counter. “It’s okay, beta,” my dad whispered as he cradled me close to him. “But you could’ve been badly burned. You can’t play with matches. I might not always be here to put out the fire.” I nodded and snuggled in closer, smelling the whiffs of sandalwood soap he bought in bulk from Patel Brothers on Devon Avenue.

That scar became a kind of fidget. A shiny strip of skin I’d rub absentmindedly. At first, it was puckered and rough. As I got older, the scar grew smaller, smoother, but never completely faded. Some scars never ever go away. Some scars remind you that you let yourself get burned. Some scars remind you that pain is a constant companion.

It was a remarkably regular day for one that would change the entire course of my life. A cold morning in December with a weak sun leaking through the low ceiling of gray clouds. Drips of icicles had formed patches of black ice on the pavement overnight, and my dad had gotten up extra early to throw neon blue salt on the steps and sidewalk. My mom ran the beads of a tasbih between her fingers, whispering prayers as she sipped her second cup of chai, a messy pile of books and graded papers next to her laptop, ready for her 9:00 a.m. lecture at the university. Her first cup of chai was usually finished before my sister or I woke up, before my dad sauntered down the stairs, ready for work. My mom liked to take her first cup of tea in the quiet dark of the kitchen by herself. “Chai in the morning should always bring saqoon,” she told me once when I’d woken early and found her. Peace. “That was your nani’s habit, your great-nani’s, and now it’s mine.” When she smiled—in the Indian way, without revealing any teeth—tiny wrinkles showed next to her dark eyes that brightened whenever my sister or I appeared in the kitchen, the sleep still in our voices.

On that deceptively ordinary day, my dad hurried down the stairs, adjusting the collar of his shirt under his gray sweater, which was on inside out. When I told him he was about to commit a fashion faux pas, he shook his head, yanking his sweater off and pulling it back on correctly. It was odd because he was usually meticulous about how he dressed, but maybe it was another sign I’d missed.

My little sister, Amal, was seated at the kitchen island, texting her friends about some ninth-grade drama. I slid a bowl in front of her and poured cereal for both of us.

“Good luck on your presentation today, beta,” my dad said to me. “Your thesis is brilliant.”

I had to write a poetry comparison for AP English. I picked this famous Bengali poem, Bidrohi, by Nazrul, and wrote about how it was inspired by Whitman’s Song of Myself. The British Raj banned Bidrohi because of its anti-colonial and rebellious spirit. And like Whitman’s poem, it’s about how the individual sees themselves as unique but also as part of the larger world. Nazrul’s work inspired revolutionaries. In his time, Whitman was banned, too. Even lost his job because of his poetry. They were both rebels.

I looked at my dad and smiled, noticing the unusual puffy dark circles under his eyes. He’d been working late on a big case the last several weeks. “I am the fury of wild fire,” I said, quoting Nazrul’s poem.

“I burn this universe to ashes,” my dad responded with the next line, then cleared his throat. “One thought…”

Oh no. When my dad got that pensive look on his face, it usually meant I was about to get peppered with questions. “Dad, no, please. I know what you’re about to ask. I don’t have time to change my presentation!”

“I’m not saying you have to change anything. But did you consider how each poet presented the role of the hero as the ordinary man?”

I scrunched my face up at him. “Dad! I thought you weren’t going to ask any more questions.”

“That doesn’t sound like me. At all. But in case you decide to pursue this topic for, oh, a master’s or PhD eventually, don’t you think it might be worth interrogating heroism in light of the wars that influenced each writer? Just a suggestion.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, but I don’t think my five-page paper and slide deck for AP English is exactly PhD thesis–worthy.”

“Yet,” he added. I braced for the follow-up queries, for a mini lecture. When he started down a path like this, it usually didn’t end until he’d gone on about critical inquiry and the opportunities that awaited me at the University of Chicago. I was relieved he was too distracted to grill me any further.

I’d applied early action and received my acceptance the day before. I’d responded immediately. I was officially a Maroon, class of 2027. I was still walking around in a euphoric state while my dad already had my entire life planned. Only he wasn’t planning the future I thought he was.

“But no pressure, right?” I smirked. My dad smiled back at me, his tired eyes shiny with held-back tears. He occasionally had these embarrassingly weird, sentimental moments. Not gonna lie, I didn’t hate it. I was very much Daddy’s little girl, always his coconspirator, whether it was for planning Mom’s birthday surprises or for sneaking ice cream before bed. We were a little club of two.

“Dad, you have the nerdiest dreams for us,” my sister said, shoveling cereal into her mouth.

Mom chuckled and glanced at my dad, suddenly buried in his phone. “All okay? No issue with the brief?” she asked.

My dad was a professor at DePaul Law School but wasn’t teaching—he’d created the immigration and refugee justice clinic, and that was his focus. He was working on an asylum case that had been taking up more and more of his time. “Fighting the good fight.” He nodded absentmindedly, still gazing at his phone. “The latest SCOTUS ruling is maddening. The entire line of inquiry was wrong. It’s Lawyer 101 to—”

Amal and I looked at each other. We guessed he was about to bust out with his favorite mantra and beat him to it: “Ask all the questions. Be relentless in finding the answers.”

He chuckled. “Okay, okay. I see my work here is done.”

He began to hunt down his keys, which he always misplaced. “Try the pocket of your blue coat,” my mom suggested. She was right, as always. Dad thanked her with a quick kiss on the cheek; then, jangling the keys, he rushed out the door, waving goodbye. He seemed to be in an extra hurry. I wondered if it had to do with the message he was absorbed with earlier.

A few seconds later, he walked back in, a blustery gust of wind following him. My sister and I looked up and then turned back to our breakfasts, only half paying attention to him. “It’s colder than I thought it was,” he said, reaching for the maroon cashmere scarf that my mom had given him for their twentieth anniversary a couple of months before. He’d gotten her a new teakettle. Thinking about it now, she must’ve been disappointed. I mean, a teakettle for an anniversary gift? I can’t be sure because my mom never said anything, not to me anyway. She’s like my little sister that way; she swallows her feelings.

“Very dapper, jaan,” my mom said as he pulled the ends through a loop he made with the scarf.

My dad coughed and then cleared his throat before pausing to gaze at us. “My girls,” he practically whispered, his voice cracking. “My beautiful girls.” I waved away his extreme sappiness as he walked out the door.

We didn’t notice until later that the beat-up brown leather satchel he usually took with him every day was sitting by the front door. He never bothered to come back and get it.

He never bothered to come back at all.

When we all got home, Amal said something about Dad forgetting his bag, and when my mom looked at it, her face fell as if she knew something was wrong. That beat-up old satchel was his security blanket, Mom used to joke. She walked over, opened the bag, and reached in with trembling fingers to pull out a note. I looked over her shoulder as she unfolded the paper. A couple of sentences written in my dad’s neat, blocky handwriting. Words with enough fuel to turn our lives to ash: I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.

She crumpled the piece of paper in her fist and walked up the stairs. We didn’t hear her sobbing until after she slammed her bedroom door shut.

Then we were sobbing, too.

The cruel act of not being loved back by the person you love the most burns like white-hot phosphorus. Maybe it’s not that there was no love, just not enough. Maybe they loved themselves more than they loved you. They might’ve promised they’d walk through fire for you, and you realized too late that they were the one lighting the match.

The universe is punking me.

That is the only logical conclusion I can draw from the tragic chain of events that has defined my life the past three months. Destiny sucks. That’s just science.

I’m starting at a new school. During the last quarter of senior year. What a joke. Not the funny-ha-ha kind; more like the fate-hates-me kind. After Dad left, his side of the family sorta ghosted us. I guess our existence was too awkward or maybe too painful for them. Sure, my aunties love some melodrama, but we were a living tragedy. There wasn’t going to be a big song-and-dance number with a happy family reunion. Dad made that clear. We were never, ever, ever getting back together.

Adults get divorced. I understand that. But this? What my dad did, it’s a whole other level of betrayal. But what I don’t get is how my dad, a lawyer who fights so hard for refugee families to be together, couldn’t fight for our family. He gave up on us without uttering a word.

He called me once—a week after he left. He’d moved back to London—where he’d lived until he was seventeen. He talked like everything was normal, like maybe I could visit over the summer. I hung up while he was midsentence. I couldn’t stand hearing how happy he sounded. How normal. He torched our lives, and for what? He’s the one who always pushed us to ask questions, and now he was ignoring the one question only he could answer. He must’ve known how much it was killing me inside.

After it all fell apart, my mom came up with the brilliant plan to leave everything and everyone we knew behind. Literally. So here we are, in small-town central Illinois, where I know exactly zero people and am enrolled in a school that only has one AP class.

My mom loved our Chicago neighborhood of leafy trees and nerdy liberals. She was always going on about building community. I mean, she was on the board of a bajillion local nonprofits—helping resettle refugees, cleaning up the park, organizing fundraisers for the local children’s hospital. Then my dad left, and she uprooted us from everything on the flimsiest hope that we could start fresh.

Nothing makes sense anymore, no matter how hard I try to figure it out.

Here’s what I’ve pieced together: Dad had some kind of toxic midlife crisis that warped his brain. According to a Psychology Today article called “Runaway Husbands,” my dad is part of an existential dread trend. He could have chosen to buy a fancy sports car, but no, he went for the most dramatic, damaging act possible. The official name for it is Wife Abandonment Syndrome, coined by this therapist named Vikki Stark. There are books and websites with all these women sharing stories like ours—their husband left a note on the fridge, took his golf clubs, and drove away. In the middle of eating pizza, a husband stood up from the table and said he didn’t love his wife anymore and left. Some dude called from a work trip and said he wasn’t coming home, ever. It’s a shock for everyone but the husband, the dad harboring a secret, who created a plan to leave and was ready to step into a new life. I fell down an internet rabbit hole of stories about men giving up. Still, nothing I’ve read, nothing in the two sentences my dad left us, has given me any real answers to the boulder of a question that has been weighing me down for three months: Why?

As in, Why didn’t my dad give us a single warning that he was going to blow up our lives?

As in, Why didn’t he love us enough?

As in, Why did I ever believe a single word that came out of his mouth?

He set a fire and walked away, not caring that it burned down everything he claimed to once love to infinity. Now and forever, I’ll be haunted by the words Dad whispered to me when I was little: I might not always be there to put out the fire. I didn’t realize he meant he’d be the arsonist.

I rub my index finger back and forth over my scar, the ragged edge of my nail catching on my skin. In this absolute crap show of endless uncertainty that is my life, there is only one thing I know for sure: I do not want to go to school today.

I slide a cereal bowl across the squeaky-clean granite counter to my sister, who wraps her shaky fingers around it. I pour the cereal for her. And the milk. I put the spoon in her hand. At first, Amal was the one who seemed to take my dad’s leaving in stride. She and my mom were always a twosome, and I thought they were coping together in their own way. Maybe that’s why my mom didn’t have enough energy for me. I was fine with it because Amal seemed to be okay, pretty good even, but it turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Eat something,” I say. “It’ll make you feel better.” God. I sound like my mother. The one from the Before Times. The Now Mom is at the other end of the counter, prayer beads in hand, apparently oblivious to the nervous panic of her daughters starting at a new school during the last quarter of the year.

“Might vom,” Amal says, spooning some milk over the cereal in her bowl.

“It’s first-day nerves,” I try to assure her. “An empty stomach is probably not the best way to go. Right, Mom?” I turn to my mom, who looks up from her tasbih and gives us a weak smile, nodding at my sister.

“Noor is right,” she mutters, touching Amal’s elbow. “Eat something, beta.” Her voice isn’t exactly overflowing with maternal assurance, but it will have to do—it seems like the most energy she can muster these days. The last three months she’s practically been a ghost. She looks it, too. Sunken eyes, dark circles. Stray gray hairs betraying her as they slip out from her usually perfect bun. I don’t even know if she sleeps well anymore. I don’t think any of us do, not really.

I start the car as Amal slides in and dumps her backpack by her feet. She seems more awake now, probably an adrenaline burst from anxiety. Apparently anxiety is a natural reaction to the shock and trauma we’ve been through. Trauma. The first time Amal told me about her therapist using that word, I didn’t know how to react. Still don’t. I guess I wasn’t sure what word to use for a dad who leaves his family for no apparent reason.

Asshole. That’s a word.

“You ready?” I ask.

Amal nods. “Do I have a choice?”

“I think Dad pretty much took away all our choices,” I say.

Amal blows out a puff of air that ruffles her long, sideswept black bangs. “Can we not?”

I clench my teeth. Amal doesn’t exactly defend Dad, but she doesn’t seem as angry at him as I am. I look over to make sure she’s buckled her seat belt, then put this ancient Karmann Ghia into reverse. It’s my father’s car. He didn’t need it in his fancy new life in London.

While he’s in London, we’re in Bayberry, Illinois, in Champaign County, population 9,438, which is about as far from London as you can get—at least metaphorically. Even our old home in Chicago, which is only a two-hour drive, feels a million miles away. Mom supposedly moved us here to take a great new job at the nearby college that would allow her to spend more time with us, let us start over, together. Yeah, right. More like no one knows us, so they can’t whisper behind our backs and give us those pitying looks my mom hates so much.

“You have your schedule, right?” I ask my sister. “Lunch money?” Amal gives me a double thumbs-up. She’s a master at the sarcastic hand gesture.

Everything sucks. We both know it.

“Primal scream?” I ask.

“Primal scream,” she responds.

I count down from three, and we both scream at the top of our lungs as I cross the train tracks heading toward Bayberry High, home of the Battling Bulldogs. When our screams subside, I feel better. Like a pressure valve has been released. Amal’s shoulders relax from her ears. I think she’ll be fine. I hope she will be. She’s always been able to make friends easily. Me, I’m mainly interested in making it to graduation on May 13 without combusting. Then I can head back to Chicago for college, and I’ll finally be able to breathe again. I can hold my breath for a few months, right? The only upside to Mom randomly picking this tiny town to move to is that the school year starts and ends earlier, so I’ll be in a cap and gown a full three weeks before I would’ve graduated at my old school. Silver lining to parental abandonment: shortest senior year ever.

I pull into the small parking lot of the two-story redbrick-and-glass building. It’s modern, built in the last ten years. Bayberry is a rinky-dink town that’s also pretty wealthy and white. Which is clear from the kids who are exiting their shiny cars. It’s like the Upside Down of Chicago.

Amal and I glance at each other and get out of the Karmann Ghia and head into the building together.

We were told to report to the front office to meet the “school ambassadors” who would show us around and help us with anything we need. I need my family back; can they help with that?

“Is it me or are people staring at us?” Amal asks.

“Definitely staring at the new brown kids in town.” I push the blue doors of the front office open as the words slip from my lips a little too loudly. A school secretary—a middle-aged white woman wearing a floral-print blouse—stares at us from over the tops of her reading glasses, a look of surprise on her heart-shaped face. Clearly she heard me.

Oops. Excellent first impression, Noor.

“Hi.” Amal gives her a cheery wave. “We’re the Khans. Uh… obviously.”

“Of course, dear,” the floral-blouse lady says with a smile. “Amal and Noor, correct?”

We nod.

“We’re so excited to have you here. Welcome! I’m Mrs. Wright. Mr. Carter, the principal, is in meetings all day at the district office, but I know he’ll want to personally welcome you both.”

“Cool,” I say, glancing around the small office. Mrs. Wright narrows her eyes at me a little. She can’t already dislike me, can she?

She turns toward my sister and hands her a copy of her schedule, which also has her locker number on it, then points to a nerdy cute boy with wavy light brown hair who is standing so quietly at the end of the counter I hadn’t noticed him. “This is Blaine. He’s the freshman rep on student council and your ambassador. He’ll show you the ropes, right, young man?”

He grins, and his blue eyes light up as Amal turns to him, brushing her bangs out of her eyes and giving him a shy smile. Ninth-grade flirting is so adorable. “Absolutely. If you need anything. I’m your man! Well, not your as in yours but… uh… well, you know. I… can… help… you.”

“It’s easier to speak if your jaw is off the floor, dude,” a tall, lanky, and possibly desi (what!) boy sitting in one of the yellow chairs against the wall says before standing up. I stifle a laugh and do a double take because, holy unexpected demographics, there are other desis here?

Mrs. Wright tsks and shakes her head as she hands me my paperwork. “Noor, this is Faiz. You’ll be in good hands with him.” Wait. With that name he might be more than desi, he’s also maybe Muslim? I thought Amal and I would be the only ones.

The four of us shuffle out the door as Mrs. Wright picks up a ringing phone. “Freshman hall is this way.” Blaine motions toward the left. “That’s where all our lockers and most of our classrooms are.”

“Senior hall is that way.” Faiz gestures to the right.

“You’ll come by my locker after school, right?” Amal asks. I nod and smile.

For a second, I see her as a nervous, chubby-cheeked first grader again, and it crushes me a little. I wish I could fix everything for her, for us, but I don’t know how. And anyway, when you’re a kid, it’s your parents who are supposed to make it all okay, and ours can’t because they’re the ones who broke us.

I’m silent for a second as Faiz veers us toward senior hall, showing me my locker. I look at the note card with my locker combination on it, but when I spin the lock it feels too loose, the numbers aren’t clicking, so I lift up the handle and the door opens—no combo necessary. The lock is busted. Awesome. Not that I have anything of value besides my phone, which I shove into my back pocket.

“You can put in a request to get that fixed. There’s a form in the front office,” Faiz says. “But, uh… they might not—”

“Get to it this decade?” I guess.

“Something like that.”

I shrug, resigned, and grab a notebook, my pencil case, and my schedule so we can continue the tour. We take a few steps, neither of us speaking. I take a breath and plunge into the deep end of conversation. “So did you get roped into giving me this tour because you’re… um, desi and—”

“Muslim?” he asks with a laugh. “Pretty much, yeah. At least Mrs. Wright didn’t ask if we were related. I agreed so I could save you from getting stuck with an overly peppy member of cheer squad who would’ve grilled you with a million questions to decide your social worthiness.”

I glance up at him with a wry smile. His brown skin is a shade or two lighter than mine, but his eyes are even darker and he’s got incredibly thick, long eyelashes. They’ve got to be hazards when he wears sunglasses. “And you can spare me the interrogation because you’ve already summed up my Thor-like worthiness?”

He grins, and we take another right turn, passing a smallish but cheery-looking school library. “I think I’ve got you sized up.”

“Please, enlighten me.”

We pause next to the book return depository, and he gives me a shy up and down. “Well, you’re wearing a tee from a band I don’t know with an oversize sweater, so you’re giving emo, but… the look on your face is telling me I should maybe shut up and continue the tour.”

I raise an eyebrow. Okay, this guy has a certain adorkable charm, but I’m not about to let him in on that. “So what does your flannel shirt and beanie say about you?”

“That I overslept, rolled out of bed, grabbed the first not-too-smelly clothes in reach, and that my hair is absolutely untamed under this hat.”

I laugh out loud. I can’t help it. This surprises me. He surprises me. I’d expected everything to suck about today. But Faiz definitely doesn’t suck.

We continue walking down the hall. Faiz has this unbothered, easy gait. It reminds me of when I was little and my dad would take me on city nature walks. Making us slow down and observe what was happening around us. Slowing down is good, he said once. You’ll be surprised what you can notice when you slow down. I suck in my breath. I hate how the good memories of him sneak into my thoughts like little fires I have to put out before they consume me. I clear my throat.

Faiz turns to me, eyebrows raised.

“Are we the only desi Muslims in the school?” I ask. It’s impossible to miss how not diverse the school is, how heads swivel as we walk by, like I’m an oddity on display.

He sighs. “Yeah, pretty much. There are a couple other Muslim kids in the lower classes, but you and your sister enrolling has seriously upped the diversity at the school. There’s maybe eight hundred students in the high school, and over ninety percent are white. And there’s only a handful of teachers of color. Like four, maybe five.”

“Damn.”

“Honestly? I know people are gaping at us as we pass by, but at least some of it is because you’re the new girl. I mea. . .