Take the Lead - Alexis Daria (Dance Off #1)

Take the Lead was listed as one of the best romance books of 2017 by Sarah MacLean in The Washington Post, and Nenia over at Readasaurus Reviews gave it a thumbs-up, which is fairly rare for her, and it's about a dance competition, so yeah, it jumped onto my to-read list pretty quickly!  I have a weak spot for figuring skating romances and Dancing with the Stars, which I never watch on-air but binge clips of on Youtube, and this book could also fill in a category I hadn't yet gotten to for my romance reading challenge: the interracial romance.  I'd planned to read The Far Pavilions for it, but when that showed up on my Kindle with a read time of 25 hours, I backed away from that, bumped it to next year's list, and put this in instead; Alexis Daria is an #OwnVoices author, and her heroine Gina Morales is a Hispanic Puerto Rican while her hero Stone is a white guy with distant Scandinavian ancestry.

SO.  The book itself.  Gina is a professional dancer on the The Dance Off, which is basically Dancing with the Stars.  For her fourth season, she fins herself partnered with Stone, whose family is the subject of a reality TV series where they live "off the grid" in the remote expanse of Alaska.  And as soon as they meet, Gina knows what the show has in mind--a showmance between them, something she refuses to do as she tries to buck the stereotype of the promiscuous Latina and put forth a more true and positive image of herself.  Problem: she and Stone actually are attracted to each other.  And when they find out that Gina's job is on the line if she doesn't win The Dance Off this year, Stone doubles down and decides to take them all the way.  There are costumes and contrivances and glitter and of course awesome dances, though we rarely see Gina and Stone on stage; most of the action actually takes place in their rehearsals and other parts of their lives.  There's a positive female relationship between Gina and her roommate Natasha (set up to be the heroine of the second book) and just all-around awesomeness.  But that doesn't meant that Daria slacks on the drama.  Oh, no.  It's a constant stream of "We can't be together because I want to live in the city and you want to live in the wilderness!" and vice versa, and a Big Miscommunication to which, I will say, Gina totally overreacts (and everyone tells her so, thankfully).

But yeah.  This book was a riot.  It wasn't perfect, but it was very, very fun, and well-written.  Stone and Gina were both great main characters (Stone of course has a Secret that he is protecting for his family), the drama is on-point, and the "behind the scenes" dynamic of the dancing show is one I haven't seen before, showing just how much of it is contrived for the audience's amusement and consumption.  I'm definitely looking forward to reading the second book!

4 stars out of 5.