Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon
(2021) 304 pages

Final Rating: 4/10

Blurb:
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?

Review:
I don’t know, I just don’t think Nicola Yoon is the author for me. 

Many people GUSHED over this book, but instead of loving it, it left me with mixed feelings that didn’t sit well in my stomach.

I found the beginning incredibly boring, and I almost put it down three times. Maybe the writing is just not for me, but Nicola Yoon writes in a very simplistic version of “tell not show”. As a result, the characters feel really bland, and the dialogue is cringey and trying too hard to show the reader who is the “shy and smart” type or the “rich and cynical” type. Everything about this book just doesn’t have the complexity nor the believability for me to think that it’s actual published work.

Secondly, the characters don’t really think. They kind of just do things. For example, the main character, Evie, gets these supernatural powers to see the timeline of every couple each time they kiss, from their past, present, and future. She never, ever wonders if she could change that future, or she doesn’t think about why certain futures happen. She just is like, “Oh, so and so broke up? Proves that love is bound to be full of misery, pain, and Shakespeare tragedies!” 

Also, how come every couple she saw the future of broke up in this overly sorrowful way except for one? And has Evie ever thought that there are billions of couples out there and that for every break-up there is a happy marriage somewhere out there in the world? Once, Evie saw the break up of one couple, learning that one of them fell in love with a Japanese girl when studying abroad or something. But that break up doesn’t necessarily mean that both of those people won’t be happy with someone else in the future, or that they didn’t end on good terms.

After the author sets up this negative viewpoint of love for Evie, she ends up suddenly changing her mind and starts dating X a third into the book! What happened to all those cynical remarks you made earlier?

I guess it got more interesting as the book went on because I felt like I learned a lot more about Evie, X, and other characters through fast-paced chapters. The ending even made me feel a little heartbroken (because surprise surprise! I’m not a cold-hearted rock but a hopeless romantic). But technically, throughout this entire book, it just felt lacking. 

So overall, this book tasted like pickle-flavored ice cream. I don’t know why I decided to give it a flavor, but I hope it can represent the amount of mixed feelings I got when I finished this book.