Updates

The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing makes the Asian Age Bestseller list in India! Rights have sold in Turkey! And over the last few weeks, these reviews have come in:

From the Kansas City Star:

“For a novel that spans continents, cultures and decades, Jacob never loses the core of those familial connections, and she has a knack for surprising readers with glimpses of gentleness and vulnerability in even the most unforgiving scenes and characters. “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.”

From Hindustan Times:

“Notions of connection and rupture, voyeurism and secrecy are expertly threaded through this luminous novel, where comedy and sadness are uniquely conjoined and where even food, lavishly depicted in Jacob’s trademark melodic prose, is like a secret language.”

From Oprah Magazine:

“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.

From Book Reporter:

“…uncommonly easy to like, right from the first pages.”

From Bustle:

“A debut novel that stands out from the summer reading pack as one of 2014’s best books yet…”

From People.com:

“This is a book for any and everyone.”

From South China Morning Post:

“The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing is that rare novel that manages to evoke mirth and tears simultaneously.”

From India Today:

 As you look at Jacob’s novel through Amina’s camera, ordinariness turns extraordinary, so much so that you may even find a ghost on the edge of a photo. In Jacob’s New Mexico, the dead and the living splendidly come alive.”

From Mint:

“Told from the perspective of Amina—daughter of Thomas and Kamala Eapen, who moved from Salem, in Tamil Nadu, to Albuquerque, in the US, half a century ago—Jacob’s novel harks back to an illustrious line of stories on the Indian diaspora in North America. From Bharati Mukherjee’s prickly family dramas to the delicious rituals of cooking and eating in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novels to Jhumpa Lahiri’s hawk-eyed attention to everyday detail, a range of influences are brewed into a potent concoction in The Sleepwalker’s Guide To Dancing, then blended with the comic energy of a Woody Allen movie and the tragic intensity of Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things.”

From Barnes & Noble:

“Dazzling and irreverent, witty and profound, this is a family saga of the most engaging kind: heartbreaking, hopeful, and alive on the page — which is why we had to make it one of our Summer 2014 Discover Great New Writers selections.”

“In this sprawling debut, and Indian family makes a bumpy adjustment to life in the U.S. There are stormy relationships, mutinous teens, eccentric relatives bearing food and a tragedy that reverberates throughout the years. With wit and a rich understanding of human foibles, Jacob unspools a story that will touch your heart.”
—People

Last week’s interview with Leonard Lopate is now up!

The July Kirkus issue features a lovely,  in-depth article by Megan Labrise on the process writing The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.

The July issue of Vogue features Up Front written by Mira about her parents arranged marriage;  July issues of Marie Claire, Better Homes & Gardens and Coastal Living include The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing in hot picks; July/ August Issue of Poets & Writers features a 2 page interview with Amanda Eyre Ward; July issues of BUST and Ms. contain rave reviews.

Starred Review from Kirkus!! “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…. Comparisons of Jacob to Jhumpa Lahiri are inevitable; Lahiri may be more overtly profound, Jacob more willing to go for comedy, but both write with naked honesty about the uneasy generational divide among Indians in America and about family in all its permutations.”

From Booklist: “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…. 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.”

Publisher’s Weekly calls The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing “an emotionally bountiful debut,” adding, “The author has a wonderful flair for recreating the messy sprawl of family life, with all its joy, sadness, frustration, and anger” and, “[T]he novel, through its lovingly created and keenly observed characters, makes something new of the Indian immigrant experience in America.”