A review by heabooknerd
Dance with Me by Alexis Daria

3.0

The dancing in DANCE WITH ME was great. It's the off season for the show so we don’t see any competition but Natasha is teaching dance and working on her own choreography. Natasha and Dimitri are on fire when they dance together. So I was really surprised by Dimitri because he’s presented in the first book as this arrogant, bad boy but he’s really a big softy. In fact he’s practically head over heels for Natasha from the start and all he’s concerned with is taking care of her. I actually preferred him this way but it made it hard to believe everyone’s claims that Dimitri was an asshole. Cause he really wasn’t.

I loved how real Natasha was; she had flaws and a hard past and she was far from perfect. Readers often see romance heroines who are capable and put together but they don’t always feel like actual people. Natasha however, is written really well and I praise Alexis Daria for that. Natasha might be a fighter but she’s also terrible with money and this plays a big role in her problems. She even has breast implants; not because she needed to meet a standard but simply because it’s what she wanted. There’s a lot of fire and passion and unexpected strength in Natasha. However, Natasha was just so negative in this book especially in the first 50% but even after that. It was tiring keeping up with her lack of self-esteem, her doubts about her intelligence, success, and ability to make it as a dancer. I understand that these are her personal struggles and they make her the person she is but it was hard to be in those trenches with her for so long.

I don’t care if characters have a sexual history and I certainly don’t expect them to be virgins or only have sex with someone they love. However, I don’t really want their past sexual partners to constantly be brought up in the story, and especially not to use them as a way to start fights between the hero and heroine. I really could have done with less references to Natasha and Dimitri’s casual hookups between their own hookups.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review