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A Novel
by Shubha Sunder
An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America.
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience―a period known as Optional Practical Training―so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel―to diverge from what's expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT―looking for a room to rent, starting her job―she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
"The novel coheres into a crystalline portrait of a woman straddling cultures and expectations while attempting to discover who she is. It's a knockout." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Various monologues that don't quite add up to a plot." —Kirkus Reviews
"Quietly subversive, this is an immigration narrative to undermine the various reductionist immigration narratives of our moment." ―The Millions
"On the surface, Optional Practical Training is about the initial phase that many educated American immigrants go through nowadays, but at heart it is about how migrations change one from within and without. This story, fundamentally American as well as universal, is told in supple prose, with ease and grace, and gives a great deal of pleasure and insight." ―Ha Jin, National Book Award winner and author of The Woman Back from Moscow
"Gloriously inquisitive about an immigrant's peculiar position, at times delightfully combative, at other times wrenchingly gentle, Optional Practical Training is a novel that is always true to itself." ―Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"Optional Practical Training is as sharp, bright, and subtle as a blade hidden up a sleeve. Before you know it, it has sliced clear through the ether of absurdity that is immigrant life." ―Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows
This information about Optional Practical Training was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.
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