The Sleepwalkers Guide To Dancing by Mira Jacob– 521 pages
Book Blurb:
When brain surgeon Thomas Eapen decides to cut short a visit to his mother’s home in India in 1979, he sets into motion a series of events that will forever haunt him and his wife, Kamala; their intellectually precocious son, Akhil; and their watchful daughter, Amina. Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it’s up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas’s unwillingness to talk, to Kamala’s Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family’s painful past.
My Review: 4.5 stars
No sleep (pun intended) for me during this beautifully written and poignant book. I was quickly wrapped up into Amina’s voice and the story she had to tell that starts in India and ends in Seattle with New Mexico in between. This doesn’t feel like a debut novel even though the author admits it took ten years to write. It’s 100% character driven and the author, Mira Jacob, seriously did an excellent job with creating these very individualized yet flawed characters. She took her time developing them by showing us who they were rather than simply telling us. Amina shouldered the burdens of the family and we saw her come of age as she shed her skin to finally unleash the woman she was meant to be. I adored the photographs she took and it certainly made me think about how important the person behind the camera is, not just the subject matter.
The dialogue, especially that of Kamala, her Indian born mother, and Akhil, her deceased brother, was perfectly portrayed. I felt like a fly on the wall just watching them converse or sleep, as you’ll understand after you read it. I highly recommend this book.
Note: My mom has told me several times about her friend from Florida whose daughter in law wrote a book. Well, my daughter at 16-years old wrote a book too, and with the availability of self-publishing, I pretty much blew it off. So now, here I am in Florida with my stack of books and a lounge chair and I tell my mom that she’d love this book, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. I was shocked and star struck when she told me this was the book she’d been telling me about. Moral of the story…listen to your mother.
Quotes I liked:
People always say time stands still, and it really is that, you know. You find the thing you the love the most, and time will stop for you to love it.”
-“Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It’s time you learned how to do that.”
-“Weddings are about fantasies—you understand? Your job is to photograph the fantasy, not the reality. Never the reality.
-“Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire”
“Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil’s, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, “Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she’s fucking with?”
Shop on Amazon Here!
