Nicola Yoon is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The Sun Is Also a Star and Everything, Everything, both of which were turned into major motion pictures. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn and lives in Los Angeles with her family. She's also a hopeless romantic who firmly believes that you can fall in love in an instant and that it can last forever. You can find Nicola Yoon on Instagram and Twitter, and at her website nicolayoon.com.
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 all 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?
Evie, faced with knowing the full truth about her parents' divorce, is extremely cynical at the beginning of this story. She is very focused on her own experience about the divorce—especially revolved around the thing that she knows that her sister doesn't—to the point where she's not sure if the end (heartbreak) justifies the means (love). This storyline was instantly captivating for me, because I personally have been having a lot of the same questions recently, and it was eye opening for me to see an author bringing those concerns to the page. Nicola's honing in on this question—is love with the risks?—is also so important for her. In her acknowledgements section at the end of the book, Yoon describes some of the challenges she'd faced in the past two and a half years surrounding love and loss. It is clear that Nicola was drawing on some of her own real pain and love while writing this novel, which is why Evie's story and voice is so captivating and believable and impactful to me. This is a story that needed to be told. It's not your cheesy, run-of-the-mill "I don't believe in love"—there are a lot of people who are cynical like Evie, who don't believe because they just don't know, and who want to believe but have just been hurt so many times before it's hard to make yourself vulnerable again. Yoon not only shows us what it's like to fall in love, but she reminds us how necessary it is for us to be vulnerable, and to be open, and to say yes even when it is hard (especially when it's hard). She does this all seemingly-seamlessly in this novel, and I'm so grateful to her for putting this all on the pages of Instructions for Dancing.
Let's talk about Evie and X! Yoon knows how to write love, and not just the deep-in-love parts, but the falling-in-love parts. She wrote a hilarious first-meeting scene (still not over that he adjusted the seat height on her bike!), setting up for a wonderful contemporary romance to ensue. As I was reading, I was smiling and laughing at loud—Yoon did not hold back from the sarcasm or jokes, nor did she put a limit on the absolute level of cuteness included within the pages, which thank goodness she didn't! Nicola's writing was fabulous for the love she needed to develop between Evie and X: it had to be young and sweet, but also heavy with the burdens of their pasts and serious with their desires for where the love could take them. She nailed it by having them interact both on and off the dance floor. Some of my favorite intimacy moments is the moment when the main character feels comfortable letting the romantic interest around their hair (whether the MC puts their hair down or the RI cuts or plays with their hair), and I positively swooned when the two of them each let their hair down for each other. It was truly a testament that on each page, you could somehow be swooning and hoping that X and Evie would end up together. Evie's internal struggles are super important to the message of the novel, so we don't get a lot of descriptions on specific things (for example, we don't really get an in-depth, descriptive dance scene, and we don't find out a lot of character details of Shirley's past), but once you realize that this is Evie's internal story, and her quest to answer the question—is love with it?—I think readers will understand the need to cut those descriptive and flowery moments out. Because, in the end, it's not about Nicola writing the most sensual tango scene or the most teary backstory scene for a character we're always conflicted about—it's about developing a main character and a love so strong with another character that the main character has to overcome her beliefs and perceptions and answer the question that all of us are wondering. (Spoiler alert: she answers it, and it's amazing and heartbreaking and lovely all at once.)
I am, and always will be, a big fan of fun, creative formats for novels. It's the whole reason I fell in love with Nicola Yoon's writing in the first place: Everything, Everything is a masterpiece, and a showstopper as far as what a creative novel format can be. Yoon brings some of that style back in Instructions for Dancing, but with muted colors. Majority of the story does depend on the prose and Evie's narration. However, Yoon does a wonderful job breaking this up by including song lyrics as a chapter, text messages between Evie and her friends, lists of her favorite book boy characteristics, and separate chapters in a different font where the visions occur. Yoon balances the inclusion of this quote on quote "metadata" with her narration, keeping readers interested and engaged with the story. This also allows for Yoon to develop the messages of the story in a meaningful and easily-reachable way—sometimes authors can depend heavily on narration, which can lose readers, because it doesn't meet them halfway. With so much of our world revolving around instant communication and music (especially recently!), Yoon just knows what it means for humans to connect and how they do it in the modern age, and by including it in the novel, she adds another layer of reality and connection to her story.
Unlike with her other novels, Instructions for Dancing incorporates a magical element. There are some books I've read that do this, but "unsuccessfully" such as The Two Lives of Lydia Bird. The term unsuccessful is a broad one, because the success of a magical element depends on the relevance of it to the story, and how well the author can make us believe that something like that would happen (which usually involves explaining the rules of this magical element). I am glad to say that Yoon nails this incorporation of the magical element. Evie needs to learn that love isn't about the ending (whether that be the Happily Ever After or the dreaded heartbreak), but rather about the journey and the love that fills the beginning and middle. She needs to learn this so that she can overcome her fears about endings and end up with X for as long as she can be with him. So, Yoon checks of the "relevancy to the story" box for the incorporation of a magical element. The second box revolves around the believability of the element, by which I mean what the rules of it are. Luckily, Evie figures out the rules pretty early once she is cursed with her visions: the couple has to be kissing, and in love, and she only sees the vision once per couple. When Yoon clearly stated all of this, I understood and appreciated the magical element's existence. That way, when the rest of the story developed like it did, I could more fully appreciate and resonate with Evie's journey.
I would love to give a shoutout to Fifi! I love her so much, she might be my favorite character out of all of Yoon's novels!
Nicola Yoon is an absolutely fantastic author, and a fabulous human being. I highly recommend her other contemporary young adult romance novels (Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star), as well as checking out her and her husband's launching imprint, Joy Revolution, which will start publishing teen love stories by and about people of color in the near future! This book was well worth the wait, and others by Nicola and Joy Revolution will be too!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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