Molly and her husband are hoping to adopt a baby. While they go through the process, Molly remembers the summer that her life changed forever. Told in alternating sections of the past and the present. ARC.

This novel was very easy to breeze through, but ultimately I felt as though the characters are very forgettable, and the writing style was bland.

Molly is a 14 year old girl growing up in the mountains near Asheville, NC. Her father is a therapist with MS and has slowly lost the ability to move and has a caregiver that helps him with day to day activities. Molly is a total "daddy's girl" and has lots of long conversations with him over the summer. She begins to hang out with a local "bad girl" and starts to do things she really shouldn't do, all while also wanting to stay a young girl.

This is a coming of age novel, part mystery and just a good book about what makes a family. I enjoyed it quite a bit!

I received an ARC of this book quite awhile ago, but never got to read it. In the meantime, I have been able to get an audio version of it on Overdrive. It was really good and kept my attention and wondering what it was that made her flee her North Carolina home and sever all ties with her family after her father's death from Multiple Sclerosis. The only thing that I really didn't like in the book happened in the very beginning of the book. when she and her husband were interviewed by a social worker, because they were wanting to adopt a child. The social worker asked her and her husband why they can't have "children of their OWN'. Being an adoptive parent, any "good" and professional social worker with any knowledge of adoption should know that this is not an appropriately phrased question to ask. A more appropriate question would have been to ask why they could not have biological children. When you adopt, the adoptive child(ren) become your OWN children, just not biologically. Other than this, the adoption storyline was very enjoyable and appropriate. I recommend this book and will look into other books by Diane Chamberlain.

Molly's past is full of secrets that she hasn't told anyone, even her husband. As they go through the journey to adopt a baby, those secrets suddenly begin coming to light and Molly has to deal with her past.

I love this one. The characters were great and the storyline was compelling.

PRETENDING TO DANCE by Diane Chamberlain is a marvelous family drama full of love, secrets and betrayals that will totally transport you into the lives of her characters. Having read only “Necessary Lies”, which I loved, I was intrigued to read a review copy of her newest book, “Pretending to Dance”. And I was not disappointed. This was one emotional read, a combination of family drama, mystery, and secrets. Time stood still as I read this novel.

Molly Arnette, a successful lawyer and her loving husband, Aiden, living in San Diego are trying to adopt a baby because they can't have a child on their own. But the process of adoption brings up many questions about Molly's past and her family, the family she left behind in North Carolina twenty years go. She is forced to confront the many skeletons in her closet.

“The mother she says is dead but who is very much alive. The father she adored and whose death sent her running from the small community of Morrison's Ridge. Her own birth mother whose mysterious presence in her family raised so many issues that came to a head.”

Everything changed twenty years ago. Molly learned to lie in the very family that taught her about pretending. Her husband knows nothing about her past or any of her family. She pretends they are all dead. She has secrets.

The novel switches back and forth, from Molly in North Carolina, living at home as a fourteen- year old teenager in 1990, to the present day in San Diego. The reader gets to see the relationships she had with her adoptive mother Nora, her birth mother Amalia, and her beloved father Graham. I adored the relationship she had with her father. The reader has no clue what happened back in North Carolina to drive her away.

Molly must make peace with the past, in order to move on in her own life.

Diane Chamberlain's insight as a former social worker and psychotherapist is evident in her writing, adding emotion an depth to complex family dynamics. This was one emotional read. I shed many a tear. Keep the tissues handy.

Many thanks to Ms. Chamberlain, St. Martin’s Press and Net Galley for the Arc.