THE SLEEP WALKER'S GUIDE TO DANCING.

THE SLEEP WALKER'S GUIDE TO DANCING by MIRA JACOB.

BACK COVER BLURB: Of all the family gatherings in her childhood, one stands out in Amina's memory. A visit to her grandmother's house in India escalates into an explosive encounter, pitching brother against brother, mother against son. In its aftermath, Amina's father, Thomas, rushes his family back to their new home in America. This decision sets off a chain of events that will haunt Thomas and his wife for ever.

Now, twenty years later, Thomas is acting strangely and Amina is summoned home by her worried mother, Kamala. But she soon finds herself at the centre of a mystery so tangled that to make any headway she has to excavate her family's painful past. And in doing so she must lay her own ghosts to rest.

FIRST SENTENCE {Prologue: A Chosen Madness - Seattle, June 1998}: It was a fever, a hot rage for words.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 17}: "You will have to be very clever if you are never going to be pretty. Are you very clever?"

Amina stared at her grandmother, unsure of what to stay. She had never thought of herself as particularly clever. She had never thought of herself as particularly bad-looking either, though it was obvious enough now from the faint repulsion that rippled through the hairs on Ammachy's lip. 

SOURCE: A Readers Group read.

MY THOUGHTS: At two pages shy of 500, too long. Not that this would put me off in itself but I'm afraid combined with the minute print of this Bloomsbury 2014 edition and the superfluous hour-by-hour, day-by-day ramblings reading The Sleep Walker's Guide To Dancing proved to be something of a chore.

Unhappy, resentful, angry, dysfunctional, obnoxious - OK, so I didn't like any of the characters. Arguably not something that should have mattered and I dare say it might not have done had they been well written but I'm afraid I didn't find this to be the case. 

Jumping around between America and India, between the 1970's and 1990's, I found this, compounded by the fact that once read I found the words instantly forgettable, meant that for me novel didn't flow well.

Hoping if nothing else to come away with a better knowledge of Indian culture/customs even in this I came away disappointed, finding everything about the novel a bit of a cliche.

Perhaps merely too ambitious for a debut novel. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for a book that despite its attempts at humour I felt was essentially a depressing read. 

A bit nonplussed by the 'ghostly' and 'gourmet' elements. And Definitely a tad disgruntled that rather than letting the characters themselves tell us their stories and the emotions these elicited we were somehow informed by the author. 

Ultimately this just wasn't my cup of tea.