Pretending to Dance

Author: Diane Chamberlain
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2015
Pages: 352
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: Molly Arnette is very good at keeping secrets. She and her husband live in San Diego, where they hope to soon adopt a baby. But the process terrifies her.

As the questions and background checks come one after another, Molly worries that the truth she's kept hidden about her North Carolina childhood will rise to the surface and destroy not only her chance at adoption, but her marriage as well. She ran away from her family twenty years ago after a shocking event left her devastated and distrustful of those she loved: her mother, the woman who raised her and who Molly says is dead but is very much alive. Her birth mother whose mysterious presence raised so many issues. The father she adored, whose death sent her running from the small community of Morrison Ridge.

Now, as she tries to find a way to the make peace with her past and embrace a future filled with promise, she discovers that she doesn't even know the truth of what happened in her family of
pretenders.

Review: I like Diane Chamberlain novels so I don't know why this one didn't grab me sooner. Chamberlain is a clean writer, which to me means story lines make sense, loose ends are tied, there are no plot holes, suspension of belief is not required, and so on. 

I follow her on Facebook, and who she is a person, her interests and feelings come through in the books she writes. Her sister has MS, like the father in this book. She lived in San Diego for a time, like the main character does. She also draws upon Facebook fan input, which she even mentions in the acknowledgement section of this book.

Where I think this could have been tightened up was in the almost constant reference to, and reminder that this was set in, the 1990s. New Kids on the Block references on every other page, Doc Martens. . .there's plenty of variety when it comes things specific to the 1990s and repeatedly referencing the same handful of items became boring and seemed almost forced.

I also wish Molly had been a little older in the book for the things she experimented with, and did. I was 14 in the 1990s, and we were still young. Kids didn't grow up so fast then, doesn't every generation say that? But Molly was generally a "good" girl, and her age and general behavior didn't fit her attempt to rebel.

All in all, still a fan, and this was worth reading.