Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon was so much fun. I think I'd love any book that involves ballroom dancing though! This was a really fantastic story about love, and the risks people take for love. If pain and heartbreak are worth it in the face of all the evidence that it might not be. Loved Evie and X and I loved the emotion in this one.

Pretty good !
I loved the main character and also the writing style of the author and I can’t wait to buy it for my friend

I think I've outgrown YA a bit, which is why this book did not completely work for me, but I do recognise its value and why others would have such a good time reading it! One thing you cannot take away from Nicola Yoon is the wonderful way she writes!

Please note that this book is not for me - I have read the book, However I had to DNF and because i do not like to give negative reviews I will not review this book fully - there is no specific reason for not liking this book. I found it a struggle to read and did not enjoy trying to force myself to read this book.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused and thank you for the opportunity to read this book

A cute romance with a little bit of magical realism thrown in. It was a heart-warming read, it also tugs on your heart strings quite a bit, but I really enjoyed Evie’s journey in opening herself up to love with all she’s seen about heartbreak and the negative end to a lot of love stories. I think it’s a really powerful book for the YA audience and one I would recommend reading.

Well, I wasn't emotionally prepared for Instructions for Dancing.

The story focuses on Evie - a young girl on the cusp of adulthood who is jaded by the notion of love since the divorce of her parents. She refuses to believe in love and rejects any notion of it until she meets X. X comes into her life like a whirlwind and he makes Evie reconsider her total rejection of amour.

To give any more information would be to reveal too much of the story but I will say that having read all of Noon's books and loving each of them Instructions for Dancing has probably been my favourite. I was blown away.

Read this book!

Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon is available now.

For more information regarding Nicola Yoon (@NicolaYoon) please visit www.NicolaYoon.com.

For more information regarding Penguin Random House Children's UK (@penguinrandom) please visit www.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Nicola Yoon is a brilliant writer and a go-to author. Never let's you down. Nicola Yoon is a brilliant writer and a go-to author. Never let's you down. Nicola Yoon is a brilliant writer and a go-to author. Never let's you down.

When Evie catches her Dad cheating on her Mum she swears off love and gives up all her well-loved romance books. Battling through grief and heartache Evie ends up attending dance school, where she meets the charismatic X and gains the power to see people's love stories the first time they kiss. This is Evie's journey learning to love again.

This was a cute romance with a very bittersweet ending, which I did not like. I won't say more than that because of spoilers.

I read this book as an audiobook.

Unfortunately this one just wasn't for me! I struggled to connect with the characters or get invested in the story. The writing was good and the idea really interesting, but it just didn't do it for me!

I loved this book so much, the depth of the story was fantastic and the emotional vulnerability was absolutely noteworthy!

SO lovely! Classic Nicola Yoon - s0 great to read another diverse YA romance, with a little magic too this time. A queen of the genre for a reason.

This is my impossibly and amazingly my first foray into Nicola Yoon’s titles. Not sure how I’ve managed it but I’m glad that I’ve finally picked up some of Yoon’s titles because Instructions for Dancing certainly has me understanding the reason for her popularity.

This book is not a simple YA romcom, it’s a story of reckoning and acceptance and love. Yoon takes us on a coming of age story with a slight magical twist. It’s witty, it’s fun and it’s also philosophical without being too pretentious. I won’t lie some of the cynicism in the story definitely grated in my chains but it was worth it to see the eventual growth.

A really solid and nice story with a pretty solid and beautiful message.

Thank you to The Write Reads for organizing and inviting me to participate in this blog tour. Thank you, Penguin Platform and Net Galley, for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

After her parents divorced, Evie decides that she doesn’t believe in love anymore, and she needs to get rid of her romance novels. When she finds a Free Little Library to stuff them into, the woman who owns it insists that she take a book called Instructions for Dancing in exchange for her donation. After Evie takes the book, she starts to get visions when she sees couples kissing, which shows her how their relationship started and how it ends. This book also leads Evie to a dance studio, where she meets X, enters a ballroom dance competition, and realizes that love and life are more complicated than she initially thought.

The first thing I want to say about this book is that it was beautiful, and it made me feel a whirlwind of emotions. After I finished the book, I sat on my kitchen floor eating bread because that seemed like the best way to process everything I was feeling. This is a book about love and heartbreak, family and friendship, and learning to savour the moment. It’s a book that has a lot of layers, and it’s a story that makes you think and reflect on your own life.

As far as the characters go, I loved them. Evie is snarky and stubborn, and she’s dealing with a lot as her world is changing around her. Her parents got divorced, she’s in her final year of high school, and she doesn’t believe in love anymore. X is a beautiful soul who moved across the country to chase a dream, who is determined to always say yes because of a recent and tragic experience. I loved watching the relationship between Evie and X grow, I love what they brought out in each other, and they had a lot of moments that made me laugh out loud.

As far as secondary characters go, Fifi was my favourite. Fifi is the dance instructor at La Brea dance studio, and I adored her. She was so determined to turn Evie and X into the best amateur ballroom dancers, and I thought she was wonderful. I also liked Martin, Evie’s best friend from high school, and I liked that they had the kind of friendship where they could confide in each other, even when weird things were happening.

As I mentioned before, this book has a lot of layers in it, and I loved how all of the storylines intertwined. I don’t want to go into too much detail about all of the different storylines, but I thought that they all combined beautifully, and together they hit me with a tidal wave of emotions that I wasn’t ready for. I also loved that the storylines featured different kinds of love and not just the romantic kind.

Overall, I loved this book. It tore my heart out and made me feel way more emotions than I was ready to feel on a Thursday night. I highly recommend this book because everyone deserves a book hangover.

Oh my word, how much did I love this book, I mean it is Nicola Yoon, but this was beyond what I was expecting and more. This book chewed me up and spat me out , in that I was a complete wreck by the end, but perversely I enjoyed it. This has an amazing and addictive love , but is also heart breaking and you will need tissues. It’s a tale of love trust, family and being true to yourself. I cannot recommend this highly enough

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

Evie Thomas does not believe in love anymore after her parent’s divorce. She loses her faith in relationships and love. Then a strange thing happens to her. She starts getting visions of how the relationships of two lovers would come to an end. Then, she gets introduced to Mr X in a dance studio and soon finds herself entering into a dance competition with him. As the story progresses, Evie begins to fall for Mr X. But she is afraid to accept her feelings as she, through her visions, had arrived at a conclusion that love leads to pain. Will Evie ever accept her feelings towards Mr X? What future has in store for Evie? Will she believe in the power of love again?

I absolutely loved the book. Having read the previous works by Nicola Yoon, I had super expectations from this book. And I am glad that my expectations did not go in vain. This book definitely stood up to my expectations. This book will make you cry but at the same time will make you fall in love with the story and the characters even more.

This was a great read! I’ve enjoyed Nicola Yoon’s previous books (Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star) and her latest had a very similar vibe. It is a book about love, exploring whether it’s truly better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. I enjoyed how the narrative was broken up with some list chapters (such as the protagonist’s favourite romance tropes) and by other people’s love stories (that the main character has visions of whenever she sees couples kiss!) The dancing theme will appeal to fans of Strictly and there are enough philosophical reflections to keep Nicola Yoon fans happy! For me, the ending was the only downside – it all seemed to wrap up far too easily given the weight of what the main character knew.

Instructions for dancing is an adorable and emotional book by Nicola Yoon. I can't say enough about how much I love this one and that ending, gahhhh!. It's a love story that's not a love story, both gut wrenching and light hearted. Instructions for dancing is an emotional kaleidoscope that will give you all of the feels...i mean every single one.

In Instructions for Dancing, we meet Evie as she’s clearing her shelf of romance novels, her favorite genre of book, set on giving them all away. Uh-oh. Turns out Mom and Dad got divorced a while back, and while Mom and sister Danica seem to have moved on from this, Evie can’t, because she’s the one who caught Dad cheating. Yikes. Love is dead, and Evie no longer believes it’s possible. A stop at a Little Free Library to unload her books (and take one home, a strange book entitled Instructions for Dancing) finds Evie in a chance encounter with a mysterious woman who seems to have granted Evie the ability to see how every relationship will turn out- while watching couples in love kiss, she sees the beginning, middle, and end of that love story. Not exactly a great superpower for someone already struggling to believe in love.

After a friend encourages her to visit the dance studio where the Instructions for Dancing book came from, Evie takes a chance and signs up for a trial dance lesson, where she meets X, short for Xavier. Tall, hipstery, and too good-looking for anyone’s good, X, a musician, is trying to ramp up his career in LA while mourning the death of his best friend. His philosophy is nearly the mirror opposite of Evie’s: take chances. Say yes. Live every moment of life and feel it deeply. Before Evie knows it, she’s signed up to participate in a local amateur ballroom dancing competition with X as her partner (the studio seems like it could use the publicity, honestly), and the two of them edge closer to a deep, meaningful relationship.

But, as always, there’s the struggle with Evie’s strained relationship with Dad, along with those visions, which have started to affect her relationship with her best friends. When a vision shows her the truth of her relationship with X, Evie’s not sure how she can go on. But with a little courage, some help from her friends, and a whole lot of heart, Evie learns she has what it takes to keep dancing through life no matter what.

This.

Book.

My God.

I blasted through this in a matter of hours, all in one sitting (with a pause to put my daughter to bed and read some Anne of Green Gables to her). And as I finished, I felt like I’d been gutted with a fish knife. Nicola Yoon has a way of worming inside a reader’s soul and just destroying it, and this is the best piece of writing I’ve ever read from her. This book is everything.

Evie is so fully developed as a character. She’s hurting badly over her parents’ divorce and the way her father betrayed the family. He’s not who Evie thought he was. Infidelity is a tough subject to tackle, especially for younger readers, but Ms. Yoon handles this with delicacy and class. Never does she fully drag Evie’s dad, but she presents him in a way that shows that human behavior and emotion are deeply complex and deserve to be examined on a level that delves far below the surface. Her mother is the same way: while she’s hurting, she puts on a brave front, and this is examined from both Evie’s and her perspective later on in the book. As a child of divorced parents who split in a somewhat similar fashion when I was a teenager, I really appreciated this honest and accurate look at a complicated and painful situation.

X is a beautiful character (and not just physically!). His grief over the loss of his friend is raw, but he lays it all out there and doesn’t try to couch his emotions or pretend to be fine when he’s not. His seize-the-day attitude is exactly what Evie needs at this moment in her life; he provides such a lovely balance to her cynicism and anger. And the dancing! I’m not super into watching ballroom dancing, but I kind of love reading about it, and it was so fun to vicariously twirl across the dance floor with Evie and X and feel the growing tension and attraction between them.

The ending of this book will rip your heart out, stomp it flat like a pancake, and slip it into the paper shredder, then pulp the remains. But after all that, you’ll still be left with a sense of hope, that buried somewhere inside of us all is the strength to keep going, to live deeply, cherish every moment, then take what we’ve learned from everyone we meet- no matter how painful- and keep dancing through life.

This is a book you can’t live without. This is Nicola Yoon’s best.

I feel like this book is different to Yoon's others. Maybe it's because of the reasons stated in the author's note (which made me tear up tbh) but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.

We meet Evie as she is still coming to terms with her parents divorce and subsequently has lost all her belief in love. She goes to donate all of her romance books and is given a book in return (Instructions for Dancing) by an unusual old lady. From that day on she can she the trajectory of people's relationship when she sees them kiss. This results in her seeing a Lot of heartbreak and only furthering her belief that people who fall in love are basically stupid.

I did like Evie but she could be very naive and also kind of arrogant in her attitude to love and people who entered into relationships sometimes. She's 17/18 and thinks she knows better than everyone about their own relationships.

But throughout the book she does grow and mature and learn to see her friends and family more clearly which I really enjoyed seeing.

However, my favourite parts of the book were Evie's relationship with X.

Now if you've read Nicola Yoon before you know that her books often have bittersweet endings but I wasn't prepared for this one. Even though I guessed what was going to happen about 3/4 of the way in it didn't make it any easier.

It's kind of an odd story. A lot of the book is just Evie and her friends finishing their last year of high school whilst she is learning to dance with X to enter a competition to help X's grandparents dance school get some promotion. There are also issues with Evie's father that she has to confront and deal with. And for a while I really didn't know where the story was going or where the conflict would be and then in classic Yoon style she drops a bomb on you!

I really enjoyed the book and I LOVE X, he's the sweetest lil cinnamon roll but it wasn't what I was expecting!

CW: death, divorce

I am utterly, deeply, fully in love. With this book! When I first saw it I knew it would be a book I’d like, but that I loved it THIS much…? WOW. I’ve never read a Nicola Yoon before, but trust me when I say I will rectify this now. I want to read them all! And I hope there will be many more to come!

But now, let’s get back to Instructions for Dancing (how cute is this title?!) first. I knew I would love it, but that it would give me ALL THE FEELS? That it would rip my heart out and put it back together, that it would leave me so full of emotions – I really did not expect that. If all Nicola Yoon books are written like this, I know I will enjoy them just as much.

Evie doesn’t believe in love anymore, even though she used to love her beloved collections of romance novels so much. But then she found out that not every love story has a happy ending, especially not in real life – finding out that her father cheated her on her mother crushed Evie. And with that, her romantic heart. So, Evie decides to get rid of all her love stories. After all, they are all lies anyway, aren’t they?

And then, all of a sudden, something weird happens to Evie, after a mysterious woman hands her a book with ‘instructions for dancing’, and then disappears. Suddenly, Evie can see how other couples’ love story began, how they fell in love, how they enjoy every moment together, but also… how their love ends. What happened to her? What is this special power she now has, and why her? Is the mysterious woman to blame, and the book she gave Evie? The book offers a clue: it leads her to a dance studio. There, Evie meets X – a boy who will soon be her dance partner! Might he be the key to all of Evie’s questions?

Right from the start, I fell in love with Yoon’s writing. It’s so beautiful and vivid, I could imagine everything right before my eyes! Most contemporary YA novels don’t feature much of magic or fantasy, but this story had an element of magical realism which I absolutely loved. For me, it was the cherry on top of a big cup of yummy ice cream. AND it had sprinkles too! I loved that on top of this, the story was very deep and meaningful. The way Yoon managed to combine love, sadness, heartbreak, and magic made for a very special read, and once I started it I couldn’t stop anymore.

As you can tell from the start of my review, this book isn’t all happy and fluffy. There are some seriously sad parts to it, but it was also so heartwarming and full of meaning, something I really appreciate in my reads, especially when they are YA. I loved that it included really deep questions and made me think – I think a really good book should do just that. Is a moment of happiness worth heartache in the future? I think this is something that many people ask themselves, not only as teenagers, but through all the ages, and I really appreciated this much depth in the story.

But on top of this, it was still also a proper YA contemporary novel. It had so many cute moments, so much anticipation of love – you could say that it is all about love, really. How is ends, but also how it starts, and what it feels like to love.

Despite the magical element, Instructions for Dancing felt so real, so deep, so moving. It definitely raises some important questions, and it teaches some lessons, too – if you want to hear them. Make as much of every moment in life, live in the moment, and love deeply. While you can. Be bold, be courageous, take chances. And, most of all, LOVE.

I had actual gooesebumps at some points while reading this, and I loved every moment of it. If you are a fan of young adult novels, if you like your reads to be sprinkled with kindred souls, love, great friendships (and dance moves!), all garnished with some magic, Instructions for Dancing is THE book for you!
Definitely a 5 star read for me!