Is love incompatible with intelligence? Sarah Glass suspects this is the case. The shy, serious medical student would be the first to tell you that the heart is merely a muscle that beats or does not, the latter to the disadvantage of its owner. A heart cannot soar, leap, melt, or break.

And this is why it's so bewildering when it happens to her.

Half-way through med school, she decides to take "a month to live" away from hospitals, exams, and illness. Her choice to rattle her world catapults her into adventures from California to Mexico -- and discoveries she would never have made in a lab dissecting cadavers.

"In Dancing on the Spider's Web, Sasha Paulsen weaves her own irresistible web. Her characters are so alive in their complexity and her prose is so vivid that I began to believe Sarah, Gabriel and Rory must be living just down the street. All I wanted was to find out what they would do next. A sparkling and utterly engrossing debut."

--MARGOT LIVESEY New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

"A funny, joyful story of young love lost and found again in the tumultuous Haight-Ashbury. You'll adore Sasha Paulsen's quirky band of misfits, especially Sarah, who fears love even as she chases it. A touching debut novel that takes you back to a bygone era when seeking mattered more than finding."

--SANDRA DALLAS, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Midwife "Sasha Paulsen has set her debut novel in San Francisco, Napa and Berkeley in the pivotal '70s. She manages to deftly capture both the spirit of those times and the essence of a cast of zany, appealing characters.Highly recommended."

--JAMES CONAWAY, best-selling author of Napa, The Story of an American Eden and Napa at Last Light.

Sasha Paulsen is a journalist living in the Napa Valley.