Shah brings important, refreshing, and depressing observations about what it means to have dark skin and an 'exotic' name, when the only country you've ever lived in is America.

Through incorporating poetry and fiction, moving from place to place, and switching among first, second and third points of view, Shah has produced a work as original and distinctive as she is...She shows what’s possible when we don’t subscribe to personal or creative restrictions..

What we witness in these pages is Shah making a place for herself in the world, for the life she lives and the creative fulfillment she pursues.

... illuminating essays.

... [a] memorable collection.

... a line, like so many others in the collection, that stops the reader, makes the eye pass over it again and again. A language. A culture. Like the lines we reread, Shah makes us question: What do we use? What are we expected to use?.

Your essays span such a wide range of time, and yet you did the most brilliant thing: rather than smoothing them out to make them all 'contemporary,' you added notes at the end of each to denote when the essay was written and then when you updated it...You leave the essay as it is, a moment in time, and then enter a correspondence with the essay itself.

Shah’s collection of essays helps to bring the often invisible sub-community into a more mainstream consciousness—which is something I, as a diasporic Indian writer myself, deeply appreciate.

Sejal Shah seamlessly invites you into the experience of a life other than your own. The Rochester native and creative writing teacher explores life as an Indian-American and her relationships with her culture and identity in this debut memoir in essays.

The poetic, probing debut from short story writer and essayist Shah forcefully tackles the complicated intersection of 'identity, language, movement, family, place, and race'.

She portrays a life rich with places visited and lived in as well as family, friends, writing, and exuberant Indian weddings—including, finally, her own, with its vibrant clothing, jewelry, and especially dancing.