I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the INSTRUCTIONS FOR DANCING by Nicola Yoon tour! Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
Book Title: Instructions for Dancing
Author: Nicola Yoon
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Release date: June 1, 2021
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
SYNOPSIS:
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything and The Sun is Also a Star Nicola Yoon is back with her eagerly anticipated third novel. With all the heart and hope of her last two books, this is an utterly unique romance.
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?
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Author Information
Nicola Yoon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Instructions for Dancing, Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book recipient and a Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner. Two of her novels have been made into major motion pictures. She’s also co-publisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist David Yoon, and their daughter.
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Excerpt
Chapter 1
A Better Version of Me
Books don’t work their magic on me anymore. It used to be that if I was in a funk or in the barren hinterland between sad and mad, I could just pluck any random one from my favorites shelf and settle into my fuzzy pink chair for a good read. By chapter three—chapter four at the very latest—I’d be feeling better.
These days, though, the books are nothing but letters arranged into correctly spelled words, arranged into grammatically correct sentences and well-structured paragraphs and thematically cohesive chapters. They’re no longer magical and transporting.
In a past life I was a librarian, so my books are arranged by genre. Until I started giving them away, the Contemporary Romance section was the biggest. My favorite of all time is Cupcakes and Kisses. I pull it down from my shelf and flip through it, giving it one last shot to be magical. The best scene is when the no-nonsense head chef and the sexy, constantly brooding line cook with the mysterious past have a food fight in the kitchen. They both end up covered in flour and icing. There’s kissing and a lot of dessert-related wordplay:
Sugar lips.
Sweet buns.
Sticky situations.
Six months ago this scene would have made me gooey inside. (See what I did there?)
Now, though? Nothing.
And since the words haven’t changed from the last time I read them, I have to admit the problem isn’t the book.
The problem is me.
I close the book and stack it on top of the others I’m giving away. One last trip to the library tomorrow and all my romances will be gone.
Just as I start putting them into my backpack, Mom pokes her head into my room. Her eyes travel a circuit from my face, down to the tower of books, up to the four empty rows on my shelf, and then back to my face.
She frowns and looks like she wants to say something, but then she doesn’t. Instead, she stretches out her hand and pushes her phone toward me. “It’s your father,” she says.
I shake my head so hard my braids whip around my face.
She jabs the phone my way again. “Take it. Take it,” she mouths.
“No, no, no,” I mouth back.
I’ve never seen two mimes arguing, but I imagine it would look something like this.
She moves out of the doorway and all the way into my room. I have just enough space to dart around her, so I do. I sprint down our small hallway and lock myself in the bathroom.
Mom’s inevitable knock comes ten seconds later.
I open the door.
She looks at me and sighs.
I sigh back at her.
Most of our communication these days comes in the form of these small exhalations. Hers are Frustrated and Long Suffering and Exasperated and Impatient and Disappointed.
Mine are Confused.
“Yvette Antoinette Thomas,” she says. “How long are you going to keep this up?”
The answer to her question—and I think it’s a fair one—is forever.
Forever is how long I’m going to be angry at Dad.
Really, the better question is: Why isn’t she?
She slips the phone back into her apron pocket. There’s a dusting of flour on her forehead and some in her short Afro, making it look like she suddenly went gray.
“You giving away more books?” she asks.
I nod.
“You used to love them,” she says. The way she says it, you’d think I was setting them on fire instead of donating them to the library.
I meet her eyes. It feels like maybe we’re having a moment. If she’s willing to talk about me giving away my books, then maybe she’s willing to talk about something real, like Dad and the divorce and how things have been since.
“Mom—” I begin.
But she shifts her eyes from mine, wipes her hands down the front of her apron and interrupts me. “Danica and I are going to make brownies,” she says. “Come down and help us.”
The baking’s new. She started the day Dad moved out of our old house, and she hasn’t stopped since. If she’s not on shift at the hospital, she’s baking.
“I’m meeting Martin and Sophie and Cassidy tonight. We’re supposed to start planning our road trip.”
“You spend more time out of the house than in it these days,” she says.
I never know what to do when she says something like that. It’s not a question and not an accusation, but it has a little bit of both in it. Instead of answering, I stare at her apron. It reads Kiss the Cook and has a drawing of two enormous red lips smacking.
It’s true that I’m not home much these days. The thought of spending the next few hours baking with her and my sister, Danica, fills me not with despair exactly, but something close to it. Danica will be dressed perfectly for the occasion—a vintage-style apron with a matching chef’s hat that sits in the middle of her Afro poufs. She’ll talk about her latest boyfriend, who she is (very) excited about. Mom will tell gory emergency room stories and insist on playing reggae music, something old-school like Peter Tosh or Jimmy Cliff. Or—if Danica gets her way—they’ll play trip-hop while Danica documents the whole thing for social media. They’ll both pretend that everything is just completely okay with our family.
Everything is not okay.
Mom sighs again and rubs her forehead. The flour dust spreads.
“There’s flour,” I say, reaching to wipe it away.
She dodges my hand. “Leave it. It’s just going to keep getting dirty anyway.” Mom’s originally from Jamaica. She moved here when she was fourteen with Grandma and Grandpa. The only time she has a Jamaican accent is when she’s nervous or upset. Right now her accent is slight, but it’s there.
She turns and goes back downstairs.
As I get dressed, I try not to think about our not-quite-an-argument but end up thinking about it anyway. Why was she so upset with me for giving away the last of my romance books? It’s like she’s disappointed in me for not being the same person I was a year ago.
But of course I’m not the same person. How could I be? I wish I were as unaffected by the divorce as she and Danica are. I wish I could bake with them, carefree. I wish I could go back to being the girl who thought her parents, especially her dad, could do no wrong. To being the girl who hoped to have a love just like theirs when she grew up. I used to believe in happily-ever-afters because they had one.
I want to go back and unknow all the things I know now.
But you can’t unknow things.
I can’t unknow that Dad cheated on Mom.
I can’t unknow that he left us all for another woman.
Mom misses the version of me that used to love those books.
I miss her too.
Read INSTRUCTIONS FOR DANCING to find out how the story continues!
Blog Tour
Check out the other tour stops on this amazing tour!
Week One:
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6/1/2021 |
Excerpt |
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6/2/2021 |
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6/3/2021 |
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6/4/2021 |
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6/5/2021 |
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Week Two:
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6/6/2021 |
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6/7/2021 |
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6/8/2021 |
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6/9/2021 |
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6/10/2021 |
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6/11/2021 |
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6/12/2021 |
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Week Three:
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6/13/2021 |
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6/14/2021 |
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6/15/2021 |
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6/16/2021 |
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6/17/2021 |
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6/18/2021 |
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6/19/2021 |
Review |
Week Four:
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6/20/2021 |
Review |
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6/21/2021 |
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6/22/2021 |
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6/23/2021 |
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6/24/2021 |
Review |
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6/25/2021 |
Review |
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6/26/2021 |
Review |
Week Five:
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6/27/2021 |
Review |
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6/28/2021 |
Review |
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6/29/2021 |
Review |
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6/30/2021 |
Review |
Giveaway
3 lucky winners will win a finished copy of INSTRUCTIONS FOR DANCING, US Only.
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