Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing (Jacob) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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.
Boston Globe


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.
Associated Press


[A]lways engrossing and often feels so true to life that it’s a surprise that it’s not.
Austin Chronicle


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.
Kansas City Star


[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.
Oprah Magazine


With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, [Mira] Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.
People
 

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.
Entertainment Weekly

 
[E]motionally bountiful debut.... 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.
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


(Starred review.) Jacob's darkly comic debut—about a photographer's visit to her parents' New Mexico home during a family crisis—is grounded in the specifics of the middle-class Indian immigrant experience while uncovering the universality of family dysfunction and endurance.... [Written] with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.
Kirkus Reviews