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Good Talk cover art

Good Talk

Written by: Mira Jacob
Narrated by: Mira Jacob, Kivlighan de Montebello, full cast
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Publisher's Summary

A bold, wry, and intimate memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.

“By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it’s exactly the book America needs at this moment.” (Celeste Ng)

“How brown is too brown?”

“Can Indians be racist?”

“What does real love between really different people look like?”

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first, they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and of course, love. 

Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation - and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions. 

Read by: Vikas Adam, Shiromi Arserio, McCartney Birdwell, Donte Bonner, Bill Cheng, Nicole Counts, Margaret Dunham, Chris Edmund, Alison Fraser, Cecila Flores, Kaitlyn Greenridge, Alison Hart, Chris Jackson, Soneela Nankani, Victory Matsui, Kivlighan de Montebello, Meera Nair, Lorna Raver, Rajiv Surendra, Oliver Wyman, and an ensemble cast 

Praise for Good Talk

“[A] breezy but poignant...memoir that takes on racism, love, and the election of President Trump.... The collage effect creates an odd, immediate intimacy. [Mira Jacob] employs pages of narrative prose sparingly but hauntingly.... The ‘talks’ Jacob relates are painful, often hilarious, and sometimes absurd, but her memoir makes a fierce case for continuing to have them.” (Publishers Weekly)

“A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post-9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist.... In Jacob’s brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterically funny, always honest, and ultimately healing.” (Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn)

“Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything.” (Kiese Laymon, New York Times best-selling author of Heavy)

©2019 Mira Jacob (P)2019 Random House Audio

What the critics say

Good Talk begins with a child’s innocent questions about race and evolves into an honest, direct, and heartbreakingly funny journey. As a brown-skinned woman married to a Jewish man and the mother of a biracial child, I experienced this book on multiple levels: It broke my heart and made me laugh a helluva lot, but, in the end, it also forced me to ponder whether I have successfully provided the answers necessary to arm my own children against racism in America.” (Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Sweat)

“Among its many virtues, Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir, Good Talk, helps us think through this term [‘person of color’] with grace and disarming wit. The book lives up to its title, and reading these searching, often hilarious tête-à-têtes is as effortless as eavesdropping on a crosstown bus... The medium is part of the magic.... The old comic-book alchemy of words and pictures opens up new possibilities of feeling.... The people are Black and white - except, of course, they’re not.” (Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review)

“[A] showstopping memoir about race in America...by turns funny, philosophical, cautious, and heartbreaking.... Particularly moving are the chapters in which Jacob explores how even those close to her retain closed-minded and culturally defined prejudices.... The memoir works well visually, with striking pen-and-ink drawings...collaged onto vibrant found photographs and illustrated backgrounds.... Told with immense bravery and candor, this book will make readers hunger for more of Jacob’s wisdom and light.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

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