Were You Team Jordan or Team Joey? Book Review of Pretending to Dance

 

Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain

Description

Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain brings us the story of Molly, a thirty-eight year old lawyer who has not been able to have a child. While Molly thinks of her marriage as loving and honest, she has some big secrets from her childhood that she hasn’t shared with her husband, including that her mother murdered her father. As the couple begins the process to adopt a baby, memories rush back to Molly, especially the summer she was fourteen, the summer when her father died. Her cousin’s emails pop up in her inbox, adding to the weight of the memories and the pain of the betrayal that made her leave her family behind.

Molly’s story unfolds in both the past and the present with chapter titles that signal where they take place, San Diego for the present and Morrison Ridge for the past. The transitions are clear and Chamberlain does a good job of making the voice feel authentic for both the Molly of the past and the Molly of the present.

Pretending to Dance focuses on Molly’s emotional journey, and not just facing her past, but facing her present, as well. She and her husband are seeking an open adoption, an arrangement that makes Molly anxious. When she and her husband adopt a baby, will the baby love the birth mother more than her? Will jealousy haunt her relationship with her child? When Molly communicates her fears with her husband, it seems that they are not in perfect harmony about how they want the adoption to go. Her concerns about the adoption feel realistic, as does her anxiety over the past.

Would I teach this book? 

Would I teach this book? Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain was a recent pick for the book club I just joined. More of the conversation focused on past Molly and her experiences as a teenager than adult Molly. It is easy to feel sympathy for little Molly and all the things she was helpless over or didn’t understand. Adult Molly seems a bit less mature for her age and her story is not quite as compelling. I wonder whether another structure may have served the story better, even though the telling is already clean and consistent.

It was a decent choice for a book club, but I don’t think that I would use it in my classroom. The story feels a bit bloated, like at least fifty pages could be pruned back in order to give it its full emotional blooming.

The nostalgia, though, was strong, and being brought back to the days of New Kids on the Block and the intense crushing on Joey McIntyre and listening to the album Step by Step ad nauseum. I was never a Johnny Depp kind of girl like Molly, but it was understandable, at the time.     

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