Review of “Slow Dance” by Rainbow Rowell

Like Eleanor and Park, Rowell’s appealing young adult romance from 2013, Rowell again sets a love story in Omaha, Nebraska, with a female protagonist who is in some ways similar to Eleanor.

Shiloh is an adult – 33, divorced, with two kids under six years old, and living back home with her mom, but the story goes back and forth in time, to when Shiloh and her friends Cary and Mikey were all 16, in high school, and part of an inseparable trio. It also switches between Shiloh and Cary as narrators. It doesn’t alternate regularly, but rather, as the need arises, so sometimes it is by chapter, sometimes by paragraph.

It begins in the present time, with Shiloh attending the (second) wedding of Mikey. She is both hoping and dreading that Cary will be there. Cary was in the Navy (he had been in ROTC since seventh grade), so she wasn’t sure if he would be able to come, even if he *was* Mikey’s long-time best friend.

The last time Shiloh saw Cary, it was 14 years earlier. He had come to see her when she was in college. They were both 19 then. It went well and it didn’t. They gave in to their years-long attraction and spent two days together, mostly in bed – “the best two days of Cary’s life.” But he was afraid Shiloh wouldn’t want the life of a Navy wife, and Shiloh was afraid he wouldn’t want *her*. So Shiloh gave Cary an “out”; she later argued, “I was just being realistic.” But as Cary later told Shiloh, “You couldn’t wait to tell me it was nothing, Shiloh. Before we even had a chance.”

Shiloh was the type of person that pushed others away first, before they could push her. She thought Cary had “never taken his eyes off the prize [service in the Navy], as long as she’d known him. There was no future where she told him she loved him and he told her that he’d stay. There was no future where he followed her or turned back for her.”

Less than a year after Cary left from that visit, Mikey told Cary that Shiloh had a boyfriend, and then that she married him. But Shiloh’s marriage with Ryan, which produced two kids, Junie and Gus, only lasted until Gus was 2 months old, when Shiloh found out Ryan had been cheating on her the whole time, even before marriage.

Now she longed to see Cary again, but she also thought that if she had learned anything about herself, “it was that she couldn’t hold on to people.” And before she let her defenses down to let someone in, first she had to believe that someone actually wanted to love her.

“She’d thought, with Ryan, that she was lucky to have someone who didn’t need to look in her eyes. She’d realized too late that he couldn’t. With Cary, Shiloh wanted to push through her own discomfort. To get over herself. To look directly at the sun.”

For his part, Cary had to learn how to get through Shiloh’s insecurities and reassure her. Rowell drew Cary as patient, tender, nurturing, and respectful, which was just what the prickly Shiloh needed.

Everyone else, of course, always had thought Shiloh and Cary were meant for each other. But getting there was, as the title suggests, a long, slow dance.

Evaluation: Rowell is just outstanding at crafting believable characters (flawed, insecure, sincere, relatable) with dialogue that seems absolutely realistic. Her insight into relationships is excellent as well, as is her ability to limn life among the unprivileged without judgment or prejudice.

This lovely story will not disappoint Rowell’s fans or fans generally of a nuanced and realistic romance full of complications that real people experience but that rarely make it into stories taking an easier, more stereotypical path.

Rating: 4/5

Published by William Morrow, 2024