I am, as always, thrilled to have been invited on a Write Reads Blog Tour. I enjoy doing blog tours because they allow me to pick a book that I wouldn’t normally choose, or perhaps rather I wouldn’t usually be asked to review.
A huge amount of the review requests I get are Horror, and of course I love that because it’s my favourite genre, but these tours allow me to branch out a bit and try something different. I like that.
So, with that in mind, I chose Instructions for Dancing from a couple of tours I was invited to take part in. The reason for this was that not only was it something I wouldn’t normally get to read but it mentioned dancing and I grew up doing all kinds of dance, so something drew me to it.
The first thing you should know about this book is that it is going to break your heart. I am known to my family and friends as something of an Ice Queen because I don’t cry at anything. I’m the girl who didn’t cry at Bambi… so you know, there’s that. This book however, reached me on an unexpected level. I didn’t cry, as many on our tour did admit to, but I got one hell of a lump in my throat.
I’m going to go ahead and assume, if you’re reading my post that you have followed the rest of the tour. I’ve been retweeting each post for my own readers, and perhaps you have found my blog via another blogger’s retweet. I hope you have, there are some brilliant blogs on this one and if you haven’t please do check them out. My tour stop however is going to be slightly different. I didn’t manage to get my hands on a copy of this book via the tour because I was having some technical issues with my netgalley account (all my own fault, I am sure, I’m a bit of a grandma at times), but I did have an Audible Credit handy so having discovered this came in audio format I spent my credit on that. With that in mind, I will be reviewing not only the author and her story, but also the audible performance.
This book is beautifully written, we hear the story from the main Character, Evie’s perspective throughout and she talks us through her life at the current point she’s at. Which is somewhat disenchanted. She’s experiencing her parent’s divorce and I can tell you, when this happens at like 16 or 17 years old it’s a weird experience, and the things she says about nothing lasting forever and love being a waste of time. I’ve said all these things myself. Also, due to the way my mind works, I connect very deeply with certain people I meet, so I connected with this book more deeply than I ever expected to.
Without wanting to spoil the book too much, Evie’s disenchantment spurs her on to get rid of her treasured romance novels and she ends up at one of those bring and take mini libraries. Whilst there, she meets a lady who she speaks to and ever after that, things start to get a little strange for her. With the support of her closest friend, the book she chooses that day kicks off the series of events which you will be reading about in the story. I really enjoyed the way this all played out and I thought it was very well written.
Another thing I liked about the book was the characters themselves, they are all nicely written and have their own personalities and backgrounds. We have a core friendship group in the book, but we also have Evie’s family as well as some characters that are meant to be more side characters but no character gets left behind in the story and I really liked that because it seems more real to me. In real life, people don’t just stop because you’re not looking at them (something it actually took me a long time to understand as a child) so it stands to reason that their lives would carry on in a book even when you’re not reading about them. This is done fluidly in this book and doesn’t just feel like they’ve wheeled a character out when it was time for them to rejoin Evie’s story.
My favourite “side” character was actually the dance teacher. There’s a reason for this. Growing up I frequented a dancing school called City Limits. There, we did all kinds of dance when growing up from Ballet to Ballroom and everything in between. Within that school was a dance teacher, I believe her name was Joanne, and she was always dressed up in latin dance dresses and had an unbelievable energy to her. This reminded me of her, and I haven’t thought about her in years because she was never really my teacher.
My favourite main character is probably Evie because I understand where she’s coming from in a lot of ways, and I like the way that she isn’t always right about things too. There’s a human element to these characters that is much needed in storytelling.
Like I said though, all of these characters are lifelike and wonderfully written. Usually, I wouldn’t necessarily point this out because it doesn’t particularly occur to me to do so, but given that it is Pride Month I will mention that this book does have LGBT characters in it and, as I’ve mentioned in other titles I’ve reviewed this month it’s nice that they have their own personalities which is important when creating characters like this. I think sometimes there’s a temptation for people to write about people of a particular group as if they’re all the same and they’re just not, it’s nice to see authors taking this on board and fully fleshing them out for us to read about.
As I mentioned previously, I listened to this on Audible, which I’ve been using a lot more because it allows me to keep reading while I go to the gym or drive to work. The narration on this one is performed by Bahni Turpin and it’s wonderfully read, the emotion that Evie is experiencing really comes over in her voice and the fact that it does means that it doesn’t feel like you’re having a book read to you. It feels like Evie is telling you her experiences and you’re hearing a first-hand account of what’s happened. Particularly when it gets into her relationship with a character called X, this is really important, and it made the experience that bit stronger for me. If you find you are a person who struggles to connect properly to characters sometimes, or you prefer to watch a film because the connection is stronger that way for you then I recommend you try the audiobook of this one because it really did enhance my experience and it’ll probably help you get to lumpy throat territory too.
This is my first experience with a Nicola Yoon title, and thanks to Write Reads and the Publisher – Penguin, I’ve been able to discover a new author who I will definitely be checking out again.
Rebbie Reviews 
Fantastic review!
Thankyou 😊