Slow Dance

(by Rainbow Rowell)

I picked this book up on a Friday night when I was looking for a palate-cleanser of a novel between nonfiction reads, and it definitely delivered. I found it pretty unputdownable—I’m pretty sure I would have finished it on Sunday evening had it not been for the fact that on Sunday evening I also wanted to make fancy tater tot casserole and watch the Super Bowl. But anyway: as soon as I was done with work on Monday, I relocated to the couch to finish it, and aw, what a sweet ending.

This is a second-chance romance that’s also a friends-to-lovers story, set in Omaha. When the book opens we meet Shiloh, a divorced mom of two in her early thirties who’s at the wedding reception for her friend Mikey’s second marriage. Shiloh and Mikey have been friends since they were teenagers, and in high school they hung out a lot with another guy, Cary. Shiloh thinks Cary isn’t at the wedding (they haven’t spoken in fourteen years; he’s in the Navy) but she’s wrong: he’s there, and before the night ends they’re on the dance floor together, even though Shiloh historically is not a fan of being on the dance floor.

The story goes back and forth between Shiloh and Cary’s interactions at and after the wedding and their earlier interactions, from 9th grade onwards. We see them as friends in high school (they never dated, though everyone else in their circle is sure that they did), together and with Mikey, then we see them reconnecting over the course of a weekend during Shiloh’s freshman year of college (when Cary is just out of boot camp) and we see them as adults, trying to figure out what they are to each other/what they want. (Spoiler alert: they want each other.)

I like the pacing of this book a lot, and the way we get a sense of the people and family experiences that have shaped both Shiloh and Cary. (She doesn’t know who her dad is; he grew up in a chaotic household and learned when he was a teenager that Lois, the person he’d grown up calling “Mom” is actually his grandma—though she doesn’t know he knows. Lois is kind of a hoarder; maybe it isn’t surprising that Cary joined ROTC—both because it was a way out of Omaha that he didn’t need money for, and because he craves order.) I like how Shiloh doesn’t like dates or parties or most people—I mean, this: “The prospect of meeting someone and small-talking and then following up with them … building tentative bonds, building trust, developing inside jokes … learning the names of their spouses, their kids, their coworkers … Shiloh honestly couldn’t imagine getting through all those steps. She’d never done it before. Shiloh made friends in school and at work, with people she was trapped with all the time anyway. The idea of making friends in the wild? Inconceivable. And completely unappealing.” But despite her prickly neuroticism, and despite how she and Cary are both stubborn, they totally work together, once they can admit to one another that being together is what they want.