Mira Jacob. (2014). The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Mira Jacob. 2014. The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2014.

Mira Jacob. The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

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34. • value: indian food
35. • value: mothers day
36. • value: mothers day books
37. • value: mothers day gifts
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Jacob, Mira
   • bioText: Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. Her recent work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Glamour, Tin House, Electric Literature, Literary Hub. She lives in Brooklyn.
   • name: Mira Jacob

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The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

fullDescription

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past
“With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”—People
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews
With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.
Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, prone to exaggeration, tells their daughter, Amina, a photographer living in Seattle.
Reluctantly Amina returns home and finds a situation that is far more complicated than her mother let on, with roots in a trip the family, including Amina’s rebellious brother Akhil, took to India twenty years earlier. Confronted by Thomas’s unwillingness to explain himself, strange looks from the hospital staff, and a series of puzzling items buried in her mother’s garden, Amina soon realizes that the only way she can help her father is by coming to terms with her family’s painful past. In doing so, she must reckon with the ghosts that haunt all of the Eapens.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: People
   • content: "With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Associated Press
   • content: "Jacob's novel is light and optimistic, unpretentious and refreshingly witty. Jacob has created characters with evident care and treats them with gentleness even as they fight viciously with each other. Her prose is sharp and true and deeply funny. . . . This is the literary fiction I will be recommending to everyone this summer, especially those who love multigenerational, multicultural family sagas."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "This debut novel so fully envelops the reader in the soul of an Indian-American immigrant family that it's heart-wrenching to part with them. . . . Thanks to Jacob's captivating voice, which is by turns hilarious and tender and always attuned to shifts of emotion, her characters shimmer with life. [Grade:] A-"
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Kansas City Star
   • content: "The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a rich, engrossing debut told with lightness and care, as smart about grief as it is about the humor required to transcend it."
5. • premium: False
   • source: O: The Oprah Magazine
   • content: "[A] sprawling, poignant, often humorous novel that's worth missing cocktails on the deck in order to finish a chapter . . . Told with humor and sympathy for its characters, the book serves as a bittersweet lesson in the binding power of family, even when we seek to break out from it."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "Beautifully wrought, frequently funny, gently heartbreaking . . . Moving forward and back in time, Jacob balances comedy and romance with indelible sorrow, and she is remarkably adept at tonal shifts. When her plot springs surprises, she lets them happen just as they do in life: blindsidingly right in the middle of things."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Austin Chronicle
   • content: "Always engrossing and often feels so true to life that it's a surprise that it's not."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; . . . both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[Jacob] has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger."--Publishers Weekly "Jacob's writing is refreshing, and she excels at creating a powerful bond between the reader and her characters, all wonderfully drawn and with idiosyncratic natures--the mother, Kamala, for instance, is a born-again Christian--that make them enchanting. Recommended for those who like engaging fiction that succeeds in addressing serious issues with some humor."--Library Journal "A memorable and dramatic portrait of a family in flux."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Amanda Eyre Ward, author of How to Be Lost
   • content: "Punchy, clever, and stuffed with delicious chapatis, Mira Jacob's first novel jumps effortlessly from India to the States, creating a vibrant portrait of a world in flux."--Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure "The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing seizes the reader early and never lets go. Its electricities reside in Mira Jacob's acute details and the sadness, anger, and humor of her characters. This novel tells many wonderful stories while also telling, beautifully, the story that counts the most."--Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts "Mira Jacob has written an utterly dazzling, epic debut. The story of an Indian American family is at once completely relatable and totally fresh. A beautifully timed novel, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is intricately woven and sparklingly played out, and it triumphs. I did not want this breathtaking book to end."--Julie Klam, author of Friendkeeping "I read this in one sitting. I couldn't have stopped--wouldn't even have noticed--if my house had caught fire. Mira Jacob is a born storyteller and a fantastic writer. The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a truly great book."--Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life "The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a time-traveling multigenerational saga that still remains intimate in its feel and cent
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 17, 2014
      Toggling back and forth between the early 1980s and late 1990s, Jacob’s emotionally bountiful debut immerses us in the lives of Amina Eapen and her extended Indian-American family, who have lived in Albuquerque, N.Mex., since the late 1960s. In 1998, Amina, then age 30, works as a wedding photographer, having given up a promising photojournalism career after a single picture—a photo of a Native American activist jumping off a bridge—made her notorious. She moved to Seattle to distance herself from her overbearing parents, Kamala and Thomas, but returns home after learning that Thomas, a surgeon, has begun acting strangely. She plans to make it a short trip but decides to stay after her father is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This extended visit forces Amina to confront anew the death of her older brother Akhil, who committed suicide as a teenager, and to rekindle her romance with Jamie Anderson, whose sister was Akhil’s girlfriend. The author has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger. Although overlong, the novel, through its lovingly created and keenly observed characters, makes something new of the Indian immigrant experience in America. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary Agency.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 1, 2014
      

      In this strong debut novel, grief has haunted the Eapen family since their move from India to the United States in the late 1960s. Now, in the late 1990s, Amina Eapen is called back from Seattle to her parents' home in New Mexico to deal with her brain surgeon father's presumably delusional dialog with dead relatives, and the family's grief powers to the forefront. As the poignant yet witty and irreverent story unfolds, Amina seeks to disentangle fact from fiction, especially regarding the suicide of her precocious brother, Akhil. Ultimately, the Eapens must relive their past in order to face a troubling future. VERDICT Jacob's writing is refreshing, and she excels at creating a powerful bond between the reader and her characters, all wonderfully drawn and with idiosyncratic natures--the mother, Kamala, for instance, is a born-again Christian--that make them enchanting. Recommended for those who like engaging fiction that succeeds in addressing serious issues with some humor. [See Prepub Alert, 1/10/14.]--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2014
      This atmospheric behemoth of a book, Jacob's ambitious first novel, follows the fortunes of the Eapens, an Indian American family dealing with tragedy and loss. Told from the perspective of daughter Amina, a 30-year-old professional photographer, the book moves backward and forward in time from 1979, which finds the Eapens on a visit to India; to 1983, when tragedy first strikes the family, now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico; to 1998, when that same tragedy, which involved Amina's firebrand older brother, Akhil, revisits the family as Amina's father, Thomas, faces a possibly terminal illness. Jacob has written a closely observed, scrupulously detailed story of an extended family dealing with the difficulties of living in America and with each other. That the past is always present in their lives provides a dramatic tension that at once brings them together and threatens to drive them apart. Jacob has done an excellent job of balancing these elements as she has created a memorable and dramatic portrait of a family in flux.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past
“With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”—People
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews
With depth, heart, and agility, debut novelist Mira Jacob takes us on a deftly plotted journey that ranges from 1970s India to suburban 1980s New Mexico to Seattle during the dot.com boom. The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is an epic, irreverent testimony to the bonds of love, the pull of hope, and the power of making peace with life’s uncertainties.
Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. At least that is the story his wife, Kamala, prone to exaggeration, tells their daughter, Amina, a photographer living in Seattle.
Reluctantly Amina...

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