Hello and welcome to another Blog Tour!
Thanks to #TheWriteReads and Penguin for making this book available to me as part of the blog tour!
This is the first Nicola Yoon book that I have ever read and it is good that I am definitely going to be reading her other books.
Without further ado, Let’s get it…
Title: Instructions for Dancing
Author: Nicola Yoon
Publication date: June 3rd, 2021
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children’s UK
Blurb (Goodreads)
Evie Thomas doesn’t believe in love anymore. Especially after the strangest thing occurs one otherwise ordinary afternoon: She witnesses a couple kiss and is overcome with a vision of how their romance began . . . and how it will end. After all, even the greatest love stories end with a broken heart, eventually.
As Evie tries to understand why this is happening, she finds herself at La Brea Dance studio, learning to waltz, fox-trot, and tango with a boy named X. X is everything that Evie is not: adventurous, passionate, daring. His philosophy is to say yes to everything–including entering a ballroom dance competition with a girl he’s only just met.
Falling for X is definitely not what Evie had in mind. If her visions of heartbreak have taught her anything, it’s that no one escapes love unscathed. But as she and X dance around and toward each other, Evie is forced to question all she thought she knew about life and love. In the end, is love worth the risk?
Purchase Link: AMAZON / WATERSTONES
Review
We follow Evie Thomas who has lost all hope in love since she found out the reason her parents got a divorce. It seems to her that everyone (her mother, sister and even father) have gotten over the divorce and she is the only one still holding on and dealing with her loss of faith in love. She decides to get rid of all her romance novels. All the books have built her standard of love and romance. Contemporary and Paranormal genre romances that she used to enjoy, no longer hold importance or even spark hope in her anymore. She takes all her books and donates them to the little library in her town. That is when she meets an old lady who advises her to pick up a book titled “Instructions for Dancing”. A book that illustrates dance sequences.
When she gets back home and see her sister, Danica and her boyfriend kissing she is instantly thrust into a vision. A vision of how their romance started and how it ends. She is fazed and when her sister tells her later that she had broken up with her boyfriend just the way she saw in her vision, she knew immediately that something was wrong.
When she gets back to school, she tells her friend Martin about her vision and he is immediately intrigued. He suggests that her visions have something to do with the elusive old woman she met at the Little Free Library. He suggests that she follows the instructions on the book and visit the dance studio whose address was on the book.
This leads her to La Brea Dance, a small dance studio that specializes in group and private ballroom dance lessons. (to avoid enticing spoilers) She is enrolled in a dance competition with a handsome guy, X. X is adventurous, daring, passionate with a philosophy to say yes to everything including entering a ballroom dance competition with a girl he just met because his grandparents asked him to.
In learning to dance together, they had to get to know each other. Once she got to know X and how he viewed the world and his presence in it, she started to think about her new gift and how it has made her see love in a different way. How she had let her new gift hold her from believing in love. When they finally kissed and she saw what the future had in store for them she is heartbroken and she returns to her shell. The love she has for X has sadness and pain at the end, she could see that but was she willing to spend the time she had with him rather than mourn for the end of their love? Mourning for the end of them. She is faced with the sudden fear of losing the NOW because of the FUTURE.
The ending definitely made me cry and made me mad at the same time but the fact that she came to the understanding, that while things might not last forever, it is better to enjoy things at the moment so that you can reflect upon them in the future.
Rating
I gave this 5 out of 5 stars
Thanks for reading.