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Instructions for Dancing


Genre: Romance / Chick-Lit


Book Type: Audio


Author: Nicola Yoon


Narrator: Bahni Turpin


Pages / Length: 304 pages / 7 hours and 48 minutes


Publisher: Delacorte Press (June 1, 2021) / Listening Library


Book Description:

In this romantic page-turner from the author of Everything, Everything and The Sun is Also a Star,Evie has the power to see other people’s romantic fates—what will happen when she finally sees her own?


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?


Thoughts: This was a cute YA romance about a girl who is "cursed" to only see the downsides and heartbreak of falling in love. When Evie meets X and joins a dance competition (think the book version of Dancing with the Stars) she starts to turn her heart around and to believe in love. I love a good romance and this was a cute easy fast read.


Favorite Quotes:

*** Quotes contain potential spoilers. ***

💃🏻 What I've learned over the last three weeks is that all my old romance novels ended too quickly. Chapters were missing from the end. If they told the real story - the entire story - each couple would've eventually broken up, due to neglect or boredom or betrayal or distance or death.

Given enough time, all love stories turn into heartbreak stories.

Heartbreak = love + time. (page 51)


💃🏻 He nods like he understands, because he does understand. He knows what it's like to have a "before" and "after" period in your life. There's a pre-divorce Evie and a post-divorce Evie. They look the same but aren't. (page 164)


💃🏻 It occurs to me that an unhappy ending for one person can mean a happy beginning for another, the way Mom's unhappy ending with Dad led to Shirley's happy beginning with him. I think about the way we're all just starring in our own stories.

In her speech, Ms. Gene made it sound like Dad rescued Shirley somehow. In her version of things, Shirley's not the evil stepmother that I think she is, that I thought she was. She's the princess who finally found her prince. (pages 207-208).


💃🏻 "I gave you the power to see love. The heartbreak is just one part of it. It's not all of it. Why did you only focus on the ending?"

"Because it's the most important part."

"Is it?" she asks. "It wasn't supposed to be a curse, Evie. It was supposed to be a gift." (page 271-272)


💃🏻 It doesn't matter that love ends. It just matters that there's love. (page 278)


Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

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