Another great book from Nicola Yoon! The main character, Evie, and her struggle with losing faith in love after her parents' divorce, was very relatable. And I loved the little supernatural twist. I will definitely be recommending this book to students, especially those who love books that make them cry!

Such a fascinating premise to foresee a relationship when witnessing a kiss. And such a fascinating moral at the end. Most of my students have devoured Nicola Yoon's books (and consequently David Yoon's books), and this one is also a keeper. Although I was most intrigued by the magical realism of the book, it was not the backbone of it, but rather the variety of relationships both romantically and between parents and their children. I will not say there were not tears by the end, but overall, it did give hope to everyone that love overrides the pain that happens when taking risks.

Nicola Yoon stole my heart once again.
This was my favourite book of hers, it was heartfelt, funny, with the best characters and left me sobbing in the end.
Plus, I loved the dancing aspect!
HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

I sobbed at The Sun is Also a Star. Sobbed. So I was expecting this book to have some of that feeling and was sad with what it was. I wish that it ended on a little bit of a happier note. All in all, though, it was a great book.

When I think of romance, I think of books just like this one, that gives all the feels and satisfies every romance junkies' heart. This is a perfect book to snuggle up with on any day.

Nicola Yoon is a great writer. She is able to give real human emotions to her characters and it makes reading YA much easier for me when I'm able to either relate or understand where the characters' are coming from.
I love the diverse character inclusion in this book and it is such a nice change of pace from the regular character description.

You'll laugh and cry and might even dance a little. All in all, a lovely read with many important themes and elements :)

Many thanks to the publisher and netgalley for providing me with this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon; Delacorte, 304 pages ($19.99) Ages 12 and up.

A girl who has given up on love changes her mind after falling for her ballroom dancing partner in this beautifully written, meltingly romantic heartbreaker of a novel from the Jamaican-American author of "The Sun Is Also a Star."

Since her parents' divorce, after her father cheated on her mother, high school senior Evie has soured on love. She is in the process of discarding her romance novels at a neighborhood library box when she meets a strange old woman who insists she take a worn paperback titled "Instructions for Dancing."

An address inside leads her to a dance studio, where she meets Xavier ("X"), handsome grandson of the elderly studio owners, and gets talked into participating in the LA Danceball ballroom dancing competition as a way to drum up business for the studio. Evie also discovers that she has acquired an unwelcome gift: if she sees a couple kissing, she will also see visions of how they met – and how their relationship will end, whether it's her sister or random strangers at the grocery. From this, Evie concludes: "Given enough time, all love stories turn into heartbreak stories."

Evie makes for a colorful narrator: as her friend Martin describes the plot of the movie "Big" to her, she notes he is wearing "a ten-thousand-year-old tweed blazer with elbow patches." Evie's first meeting with Fiona "Fifi" Karapova, the fierce dance instructor at the studio: "white and tiny with severely cut jet-black bangs - stomps down the hallway toward me." Evie also refers to Fifi as "exploding firecracker woman." As Evie and X learn the dance routines and get to know each other, they fall in love and Evie reconciles with her father.


Yoon offers smart, funny dialogue, appealing characters and an irresistible love story.


...

A lovely book from Nicola Yoon. I enjoyed Instructions for Dancing.

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?

Wow wow wow do I love a well done YA romance. Why do I always forget this?

I read Everything, Everything and loved it and really, really liked this one too. I fell in love with the characters and really loved watching them fall in love with each other. Learning to dance together was a lovely way to parallel their growing relationship, but it almost felt secondary. I was expecting it to feel more like the main event. The first 50% felt a little slow but the rest makes up for it.

This was so good. I highly recommend!

Overall

I know what you’re thinking. What’s Sammie doing reading a romance book? Has the world ended? It’s okay. The apocalypse hasn’t come yet . . . that I’m aware of. You know, I could just be late getting the news. Who knows? I wasn’t going to read this book at all, since romance books really aren’t my thing. But you know what? It seemed like everyone was talking about this book, and several people with similar taste to me actually read it and enjoyed it. So I thought, why not? So here we are.

Instructions for Dancing is more than just a sweet romance (though it is that, too). It’s one girl’s quest to restore her faith in love and learn how to forgive.

I will say that I thought the plot was fairly predictable from the outset, but I think that about pretty much every romance book I read (mostly because you already know what the outcome is going to be, obviously). Despite that, though, this was a very sweet read. I loved Evie’s voice, which is the main reason I enjoyed this book so much. It leapt right off the page and pulled me in and held me fast.

My Thoughts

- Evie’s voice is delightfully teen: snarky with a little bit of cynicism, which makes it really fun and easy to get into the story. This was the first thing that struck me before I even picked the book up. While I was deciding whether or not I wanted to read it, I actually read an excerpt from the opening and was immediately drawn to Evie’s voice. She felt familiar and comfortable and I wanted to know her story. It’s been a minute since I was a teenager, but there were so many things about Evie’s voice and story that I could remember and relate to.

Being a teen is hard enough without losing your faith in love, but it’s not hard to see why Evie would. Her parents split up, and she caught her father cheating on her mother. That’s enough to throw a wrench in anyone’s world view. I loved the relatability of Evie’s struggle. It’s easy to lose faith in something you once thought was solid when things change. Despite her cynicism, she’s a teen, and teens are prone to attraction and drama, so this whole “avoiding love for eternity” thing was bound to end poorly, right?

- The romance is sweet, if not predictable, but the banter was absolutely brilliant. If you’re into books that will feel like a warm hug, this is one of those. Even though it delves into dark places, it’s forever reassuring and uplifting the reader. It never leaves you in the darkness for too long. Just enough to get the point across.

The banter between X and Evie is just *chef’s kiss*, though. It’s snarky and adorable and often comes out not quite as intended, like you do. As I said, the romance is sweet, which means there’s not really much struggle and many things to overcome. If that’s the way you like your romance, this’ll hit the spot. As unrealistic as it may be at times, it’s hard not to root for X and Evie, because they’re just too cute.

- Evie’s friends—or maybe more accurately partners in crime?—are a ridiculously fun bunch. They’re sarcastic and their banter is on point. Do you really need more than that? Evie’s friend group has been together for years, and they’ve got that broken-in feel to them. They’ve been with each other through thick and thin, but now they’re growing up and things are changing. Change is hard as a teenager. It’s even harder when you’re actively trying to avoid it and pretending like things can always stay the same.

What I loved most about this friend group is that it felt familiar. I acted similarly dorky and silly with my friends, so these scenes always put a smile on my face! Like I said, it’s been a minute since I was in that spot myself, but boy did it make me nostalgic for a little bit.

- There are some big conversations in this book about love and heartbreak and disappointment that I think fit really well in a young adult book. First, there’s the conversation around Evie’s father cheating and her parents’ divorce. It’s hard to forgive a parent when it feels like they’ve betrayed you and lost your trust. I actually wish this storyline had been dragged out and explored a little more, because it felt kind of easy and like everyone was trying to convince Evie that she was wrong for being angry. To heck with that! She had every right to be mad! But people cope and forgive in different ways, and I did like the message of learning how to forgive, even if it’s not an easy journey.

The journey Evie takes to trust in love again, though, is even more powerful. It’s really easy to always see the negative side of things when you’ve been hurt. Evie believes love just ends in pain, and she finds ways to convince herself that since that’s always the case, it’s better to simply avoid it at all costs. I really enjoyed the narrative of learning to love again and all the forms that takes, from finding a romantic love to just seeing the people around her testing the waters of love, to relearning how to love her father after being heartbroken.

- There’s a magical realism element in this that I wasn’t expecting that added some interesting depth to the conversation around love and heartbreak. In some ways, this was a weaker part of the story, because it was never explained or explored. It just came and then sort of went, with no real explanation. I didn’t entirely need an explanation, but for me it felt sort of tacked on, in a way, rather than solidly part of the story. That being said, I did enjoy it. Basically, Evie can see the love story of the couples around her. Love stories that often end in breakups and heartache, which maybe isn’t too surprising considering she’s often surrounded by teens and young people, who don’t generally meet one person and then stay together forever. But is love even worth it, then, if it always ends the same way?

Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon
Thanks to Random House Childrens and NetGalley for this title.
I jumped on the Yoon band wagon when Everything Everything blew up. Unlike the others this is less about falling in love and more about preventing and protecting your heart.
Evie is a senior in high school. As she prepares to graduate everything seems to be changing, her parents are getting divorced and then suddenly her father is remarried. They’ve moved from their house to an apartment. Two of her friends begin dating each other. Woeking cleaning out her romance books because she no longer believes in them she takes them to a free little library where she suddenly given the power to see how relationships develop and ultimately end. It’s quite stressful for her and instead of putting herself out there for romance she clears herself off.
The joy of this story is watching a young person grow not only in age but wisdom beyond her years.

This story was adorable and I loved the banter between Evie and X. I love that Evie steps out of her comfort zone to learn something new.

After her parents' difficult divorce, Evie has given up on love...until she receives a strange book called "Instructions for Dancing" and she can suddenly see the past and future of the relationships of people around her. Evie's life changes further as she begins a relationship with X and learns to forgive his father for his infidelity. This book will definitely be a hit with YA readers of Yoon's other work, though it is not the lighthearted romance that the cover foretells.

Instructions for Dancing is a super fun story that readers of Everything Everything will love. Nicola Yoon's romances are always so sweet and fun. Will definitely be adding to my library.

You can find my full review in good reads, the link is below. I really enjoyed this book and rated it four stars

It has been a while (read: months) since I read this book along with my friends from our book club, so for that reason I will keep my review on a shorter side (as some parts of the book are blur now).

I wish I didn't read any reviews for Instructions for Dancing before going into it, because I read the main spoiler and it ruined my whole reading experience.
I understand people write spoilers in their reviews, but I don't appreciate it wheb they do it in first sentence or without any warnings.

This is contemporary ya with magical realism and at first I wasn't a fan of it, even though it was obvious the way it would turn to from the very premise, but as the story progressed and we came to the end, I appreciated it and am glad the writer decided to spice her story with little magic instead picking the chliche she could have gone for.

I love the way we saw the LOVE from many angles and how it got it's own personality through the story.

The writing was beautiful. The very first sentence was capturing and it reminded me how I fell in love in the first sentence from the author's previous book called Everything, Everything.

Characters were good to follow, I really loved X. Evie was good although some things I wanted for her to deal differently with.
Some other side characters really got on my nerves and overall all the interactions between them reminded me about how unfair life can be.

Overall, this was a quick read that I am glad I had an opportunity to enjoy and I recommend it to people who enjoy ya contemporaries and don't mind splash of magic in their stories.

This book won't teach you how to dance, but it will make you want to go out and live life to the fullest! I thought this book was the perfect mashup of Big and Save the Last Dance. I thought all the characters were likeable and I enjoyed the character development that took place.

This was a great story and like all of Yoon's other books it shows that not every book has a perfect happy ending and that's perfectly okay!

. Def did not expect the ending but it was what we needed.

Evie doesn’t believe in love anymore after seeing her dad kiss someone else, this of course leads to the divorce of her parents. This can be very relatable for many and draw them into the book. Getting the ability to see someone’s relationships from beginning to end was a premise that I loved to see in the book and a different theme than I’ve seen in other books.

Though this book didn’t end in an happily ever after, it was still a good read

What a great cast of characters! This was an emotional read, so keep those tissues close by. This is a thought provoking and heart wrenching story. I enjoyed Evie as a main character and her relationship with X. I really loved the dance aspect of this story as well. Highly recommend!