Discovery 1 (an excerpt)

When she was a teen, she deplored her skinny size. She was tall and lanky, and hated it. She came from a people who valued roundness in females, and at sixteen, she was anything but that...in fact, nothing about her promised she was headed in the right direction in the distant future.
"A woman should look like a woman!" her grandmother used to say. "Give that child some food; how on earth is she going to find a husband looking like that?" In truth, a lot of the comments from family and friends were directed at Aisha and her sister, but being older, the impact it had on her was stronger. Aisha grew up to be super self-conscious about her looks. She wore her scrawny frame like a tortoise shell, and retreated into herself, spending hours indoors reading while other teenagers hung out at the community centre playing pool and watching movies. It was the reading that saved her. Aisha loved escaping into the realm of the imagined, and through story books she discovered that somewhere in the world (wonder of wonders!), thinness was a look to be desired.