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Slow Dance

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Slow Dance

By: Rainbow Rowell
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.

Rainbow Rowell is back with her first adult novel in ten years in this uplifting novel about star-crossed lovers and the power of second chances


Discover the big, beaming power ballad of a novel about a love so true it refuses to be forgotten . . .

Back in high school, everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together . . . everybody but Shiloh and Cary.

They were just friends. Best friends. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. Shiloh was going to become an actress, and Cary was going to join the Navy. And nothing was ever going to change between them – Shiloh made him promise.

Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. But, somehow, everything changed.

Now it’s been fourteen years since Shiloh last spoke to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back in north Omaha living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When Shiloh gets invited to an old friend’s wedding, all she can think about is whether Cary will be there – and whether she hopes he will be.

Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. And what will happen when they try to make their way back to each other.

'Sexy, sweet, wise and nostalgic – Jane Austen’s Persuasion for our times’ Gabrielle Zevin

‘A gorgeous book . . . a beautiful, believable love story between two slightly broken people. So sweet, but never sentimental. I yearned for them to be happy and I miss it now it's over’ Marian Keyes
'Deeply human, profoundly romantic. Rowell will break your heart and you’ll thank her for it' Leigh Bardugo


‘Who can deny the absolute, dizzy pleasure of loving a novel so much . . . I loved every page of Slow Dance, a book that is romantic to its core, and as funny and smart as its wonderful characters' Emma Straub
'A will-they, won't-they second chance romance for the ages, this one is poised to be one of summer's breakout hits' People


‘A powerful and poignant tale of first love . . . Rich, real, and emotionally raw, this satisfying contemporary is sure to impress’ Publishers Weekly

©2024 Rainbow Rowell (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Coming of Age Contemporary Family Life Friendship
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What listeners say about Slow Dance

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  • Overall
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Great love story

I loved the character of Carey he had the patience of a saint. I felt at times very frustrated by the character of Shiloh. I like the premise of the story and the obligatory happy ending.

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Heartwarming

Really liked this story, the narration is fantastic and the narrators voice is quite calming. The story is just generally easy to listen and lovely, funny at times. It’s not especially gripping or anything life changing but it’s a nice listen. I liked Carey he’s a great character

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An absolutely beautiful book!

I loved this book from start to finish. Heartwarming, funny and extremely well written. It’s a gem

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Beautiful !

Loved every minute of this, wonderful narration too ♥️. Listened to the last 8 hours back to back

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Lovely Story

Eleanor&Park is one of my favourite books so of course I give Rainbow Rowell always a try (Fangirl was a hit but Attachments a miss for me). This one was really good. I liked the story, liked learning a bit more about the Navy and liked that the characters had flaws (inside and outside). It seemed to drag a bit in the middle with the Shiloh and Cary‘s one step forward and two steps back - why the four sta

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A rewarding listen

By that I mean that the ending won’t disappoint or depress you. This is a beautiful love story from school into adulthood. Career choices, family, insecurities and misunderstandings all have to be overcome. I loved the narrators voice and the way she read this fantastic story. It is not overly mushy, just real. Highly recommend!

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If you’re thinking of listening, read this FIRST

Here are the things I wished I knew before I started listening - you can scan through 3 points and read what speaks to you ;)

1. The female character has incredible self-esteem and insecurity issues.
The way she’s communicating with her love interest is - if you’ve done the work - irritating. I kept listening hoping there would be a character growth arch and she’d realise her mistakes. Nope! So it turned out to be just irritating. And I can imagine that if someone who has similar issues would listen to this would just see the way they do things/communicate validated, and would expect a happy ending in their life too. But the frustrating way of thinking and communicating by the female character makes this happy ending not believable, because she didn’t grow or work on her stuff so the same patterns that lead to her not being with the guy at first are -if unaddressed, and seems the character is clueless and won’t be addressing them - surely going to lead to a breakup.

2. The way sex is described…
I am ALL for a hot and steamy part(s) of a book. Here, 8h into the book we have a first sex scene. And it doesn’t stick the landing. First of all, after a book with (as far as I can remember) ZERO f-bombs until that point, suddenly there are cocks and dicks in descriptions and it just feels very out of nowhere and not aligned with the character and the 80% of the tone of the book. Also personally it bothered me that a female author described penis only as cock or dick and vagina as vagina. If we were to revert it and have a male author refer to female genitals only as pussy and to male genitals as penis, I’d find it sexist. And so in reverse, I also find this sexist in this book. Also at times it felt like the author never talked to a guy about sex… like ever? ‘He was so hard he was hallucinating’ had me laughing. And the frustrating communication patterns of the female character has her talk about one of their mothers while he was inside her, making it all feel really weird - it was an attempt to bring a bit of 50 Shades of Grey into a book that didn’t anywhere else in its 80% of writing indicate or hint we’d go there… and then the descriptions and acts landed as comic and frustrating, not sexy.

3. This should’ve been a first person narration!
The book, especially in the first half feels like it was written initially as first person description only to then be changed to 3rd person. Which resulted in every third or sometimes second sentence starting from the character names. ‘Shiloh did this. She was thinking about that. Shiloh never thought about that. It was unnecessary. Shiloh was never a kind of person…’ something that in a written book maybe would’ve been easier to ignore, in audio version the repetition of the first name of the main character was jarring. It got better at the end, but the whole book really WAS presented from the female character’s perspective, so imo it should’ve just been first person narration.

The good thing:
Narrator did a brilliant job with the material given :)

Overall, the story would’ve probably been ok if it wasn’t for the jarring problems with communication, narration and the way sex was presented. I waited a week to write this review and I remember very little of the story by now. It’s been overshadowed by the frustrations.

I found this book through Reese Whiterspoon’s book club and I could not help but think that this book was picked by a 15yo intern dreaming about romance and sex, and wondered if Reese even read it.

As an adult woman in a relationship for 14 years I just cannot get past portraying someone who is clearly hurt and needs to get help as a glorified ‘you get a happy ending without doing the work on yourself’, reinforcing in those that do need help that growth is not necessary, you just need to get lucky to get your happy ending.

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Nothing happens?!?

I listened to this book on holiday and Kept waiting for something to happen, but it didn’t! The narration was good but that’s about the only positive.

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