Title: Instructions for Dancing
Author: Nicola Yoon
Type: Fiction
Published: 2021
Pages: 281
TW: Infidelity, Death
“People are always saying stuff like “Take a chance on love.” “Love is worth the risk.” Etc. But the visions have taught me differently. […] Yes, falling in love requires a leap of faith. But people only jump because they don’t know what the ground looks like. They believe their landing will be soft. That the ground is littered in soft stuff – feathers, down pillows, fluffy blankets, the shaggiest shag carpeting. But I’ve seen the ground. It is covered in lethal spikes fashioned from the bones of other jumpers. The fall is not at all survivable.”
Instructions for Dancing is a layered young adult novel from Nicola Yoon with the slightly bitter and cynical Evie at the centre. Burnt by her parent’s divorce, she has truly given up on love and any faith it promises. In a strange turn of events, she suddenly has the ability to see a couple’s future when she sees them kiss. Watching couple after couple break up, it reaffirms her distrust in love. Enter X, a boy she meets at a dance studio and suddenly everything she thought she knew is out the window – maybe he’s worth falling for?
This book really feels like Yoon’s raw and unfiltered thoughts on love – both the good and the ugly. She’s a self confessed hopeless romantic (like me) but despite that, she knows the pain love can cause and she’s poured it all into Instructions for Dancing. Like any YA romance, it’s filled with cute, slushy, soft romance, but as with Yoon’s The Sun is Also a Star, there’s also a profound commentary on the world we live in too.
Evie is a brooding teenager and has had to endure the pain of watching her parents divorce. On top of that, being able to see other relationships as they fall apart (a supernatural twist that doesn’t take away from this book’s plausibility) it’s easy to see why she has lost all faith in love. Her relationship with X is a comforting element in the book but it’s actually the other love in the book that make it as profound as it is.
From the love from her family, sister, friends, and even people she doesn’t like, but whom chose to care for her, it gives the reader pause to realise that we don’t often chose who we love, and we may lose those we love, but we should appreciate the love we have, wherever it comes from, even if it is only for the briefest time.
For any fellow hopeless romantics reading, I’ll leave you with the below (which should be enough to convince you to read this!)
“I don’t know why we lose the people we love and how we’re expected to go on after we lose them. But I know that to love is human. We can’t help ourselves. The philosopher-poets say love is the answer, but it’s more than that. Love is the question and the answer and the reason to ask in the first place. It’s everything. All of it.”
Review overview
Summary
9.1Beautiful, Raw, Unexpected