Reviewed by Courtney Talbott for Readers’ Favorite

Dance Like You Mean It by Jeanne Skartsiaris is a fun, quick read sure to please fans of women’s fiction. Cassie Calabria is a wife, mother, nurse, and all around people pleaser. She feels content, but somewhat stuck in the everyday, and so she decides to try her hand at writing a romance novel after reading an article about how in demand they are. To her surprise, not only is her novel published, it is a runaway success. Now she is dealing with her newfound fame while simultaneously trying to juggle a floundering marriage, a troubled daughter, and her own desire for anonymity. Can she pull it all together and live the kind of life that she writes about? The reader will enjoy the ride to find out.

Jeanne Skartsiaris’s Dance Like You Mean It is a fun romp through a midlife journey, and readers will certainly be cheering Cassie on. What starts as a frothy confection about a housewife’s everyday frustrations becomes something more poignant as we see what happens when her book forces her to wake up to the realities of her life. Her husband is cheating on her, her teenage daughter won’t talk to her and then ends up in her own ER, her mother is mysteriously ill, and Cassie is just trying to keep her head above water. I really enjoyed the parts that focused on Cassie and her life. The tone of the book is conversational, like chatting with a friend over coffee. I didn’t connect as much with the parts of Wild Rose, her fictional romance novel, but I understood that freewheeling Rosemary was needed as a foil for Cassie’s structured life. Overall, I enjoyed this book very much and I am pleased to have spent time with Cassie and her family.