Shaila’s Dance
A Novel
Sumptuous descriptions of new cultural elements vivify Shaila’s Dance, a thoughtful coming-of-age novel.
A young Indian woman searches for her identity in Mohini Dasari’s perceptive novel Shaila’s Dance, about dreams, travel, and the unconventional paths that lead back home.
Anokhi, an adoptee from India, is bullied at school. She sometimes helps her single mother, Sasha, work at their Idaho diner. Sasha is open about Anokhi’s adoption; in turn, Anokhi is considerate of her mother’s feelings. Their relationship is informed by trust, love, obligation, and self-imposed guilt.
Scenes of Anokhi and Sasha’s home life are interspersed with Anokhi’s dreams about Shaila, a mysterious dancer in traditional Indian dress. The dreams hint at Anokhi’s yearning to understand her past. Because of them, she wants to learn dance, too.
The alternating plot structure relies on intriguing stylistic contrasts. The dreams are written with intense, florid emotions and depict physical energy, while Anokhi’s waking life is covered in more restrained, introspective terms, befitting her initial hesitance at seeking passionate new directions for herself.
Anokhi is a bright, conflicted heroine whose experiences are too often rushed through in summary form. She questions why she feels different; she goes to counseling for anxiety and depression. When she’s sixteen, Anokhi drops out of high school like her friend Kale, who left to help with his parents’ convenience store. A year passes; at eighteen, in part because of the cultural connection she feels through Shaila, Anokhi travels to Delhi.
The story’s coming-of-age trajectory is a familiar one, and Anokhi’s first encounters with India are also handled sans surprises. Passages are devoted to the cultural differences she witnesses, as well as the new scents, flavors, and sights she experiences. Sumptuous descriptions of a dance festival and a home stay with a friend fold into these enthusiastic outsider’s views of the place; a knack for eye-catching imagery helps underscore Anokhi’s desire to absorb as much as she can about the heritage she feels she’s missed out on. In time, Anokhi’s naïveté gives way to the awareness that, behind India’s beauty, there are harsh realities, including pervasive harassment and poverty.
Anokhi is unaware of the official channels involved in searching for her birth parents, and roadblocks in this process disappoint her. Though she becomes more independent as she travels in search of answers, she also becomes more ambivalent about India, which remains somewhat of a mystery to her throughout. She practices Hindi and explores Indian dance, whose rituals are conveyed in conversations with fellow dancers. Here, the prose is succinct and balanced in providing information about regional dance styles, costumes, and their differences while keeping Anokhi’s curiosity as its focus.
Anokhi’s search is resolved by chance, thanks to an encounter with an elder who knows about Anokhi’s family’s past. The coincidence strains credulity. Further, the cause of Anokhi’s persistent dreams about Shaila is predictable. Disclosures about past violence fuel Anokhi’s emotional growth, though, as the book moves toward a satisfying conclusion that leaves room for understanding that ideas of home and belonging aren’t bound by geography and history as much as they are by enduring relationships.
In the fascinating coming-of-age novel Shaila’s Dance, an adopted woman explores her birth country and finds renewed strength through friendships and love.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
