Dance Butterfly Dance by Reese Rivers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Savy’s got secrets that she’ll never tell
A nobody, a nothing, all alone, she’s in hell
They walk past her, ignore her, like she’s not even there
When all she ever wanted was someone to care
No one sees her until she steps into that cage
She flutters her wings and plays her part on a stage
She hides behind her mask and dances to their tune,
terrified of the day that her secrets will bloom
When the mask is ripped away, and they rage at the lie,
the Butterfly finally stops dancing
and will learn how to fly

Dance Butterfly Dance is book 1 of a duet and will be completed in
Burn Butterfly Burn.

A contemporary why choose romance set in the third year of university. Multi POV, multiple love interests, very detailed high steam scenes, No full MM but a fluid scene with her in the middle.

Savy St. James is a sad lonely girl with too many secrets to count. She hides away in her oversized frumpy clothes and thick glasses wishing she was brave enough to be seen without her mask.

One small favor backfires and forces her into a fake date deal by the school’s hot shot quarterback. Him and his three best friends treat her like a pet to play with and are careless with her until she’s had enough and breaks the deal. But when her secrets are revealed and her masks are stripped away, they will all burn for it.

Dance Butterfly Dance

Secrets, Masks, and Dangerous Attraction

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💛💚🖤
Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Chemistry: 🧪🧪🧪🧪
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍
Character development: 😋🙂😁😛
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Full Cast Duet Narration

Character Backgrounds and Plot Summary

Savy St. James immediately stood out to me because of the contrast between the girl everyone sees and the woman she becomes when she puts on her Butterfly mask. At university, she hides behind oversized clothes and thick glasses, keeping herself small and practically invisible. Dancing is where she feels free, and that secret life becomes especially important once Tate Valor pulls her into his world. Tate, the star quarterback, initially sees Savy as a convenient solution to his problems. He needs a fake girlfriend to discourage the attention from women he believes are after his status, and he also needs her academic help to keep his grades high enough to stay on the team. What starts as a calculated arrangement becomes much more complicated when his supposedly fake public displays of affection begin affecting him for real.

Then there is Jude Dixon, and honestly, he was the character who stole the show for me. He is outrageous, impulsive, heavily pierced, and completely unpredictable, but beneath all that chaos he is remarkably perceptive about Savy. He is the first of the men to really see something special in her and becomes intensely attached to her. Beckett James is a much quieter presence. His football career has effectively been taken away by a devastating knee injury, leaving him depressed and uncertain about what comes next. His attraction to Savy develops alongside his desire to understand who she really is. Asher James is the complicated holdout. While the others become fascinated with Savy, Asher remains fixated on the mysterious Butterfly dancer he has watched from afar. His obsession with Butterfly makes his growing attraction to Savy particularly interesting because he does not initially realize how closely the two women are connected.

Highlights and Limitations

The biggest strength for me was the way Savy’s two identities gradually collide. I especially liked that the men become interested in the quiet, awkward Savy before they fully understand the woman behind the mask. It avoids making her transformation simply a “take off the glasses and suddenly she’s beautiful” storyline. Her confidence comes from dancing and from finally realizing that she does not have to accept being treated as insignificant.

Jude was easily my favorite. His ridiculous sense of humor and deliberately outrageous behavior made many of his scenes entertaining, but I also liked the moments when that silliness dropped away and his feelings for Savy became obvious. His behavior during the classroom storyline was one of the moments that really cemented him for me as more than just the comic relief.

I also appreciated Beckett’s storyline because his injury gives him something emotionally substantial to deal with beyond simply competing for Savy’s attention. His lost football career leaves him searching for another direction, and his interest in Savy becomes part of that emotional vulnerability.

My biggest frustration was the way some of the boys treat Savy before they understand how badly their behavior is affecting her. The fake-dating setup deliberately puts her in an uncomfortable position, and I found myself wanting her to push back much sooner. Fortunately, she eventually does. The ending also made me want to yell at several characters because so much of the fallout could have been avoided with an honest conversation. That said, the emotional explosion certainly made me want to know what happens next.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the fact that Savy is a curvy girl, not only is she curvy, but she is also a nerd who likes to hide behind large clothes. Not only would it be difficult for a curvy girl to become a highlighted go-go dancer in a club like the one Savy works in, but for her to catch they eye of four of the big men on campus, who can have anyone they want, it just isn’t realistic at all.

Narration

The full-cast narration was a major plus for me. Maeve York, Christian Black, Vincent Skye, and Matt Haynes give the different perspectives enough separation that I could follow the shifting viewpoints without feeling like everyone sounded interchangeable. That is particularly useful in a story with Savy and four very different male personalities.

I thought the format worked especially well for the contrast between Savy’s quieter personality and the very different energies of Tate, Jude, Beckett, and Asher. Jude’s outrageous personality needs a narrator who can sell his humor and intensity, while Beckett’s more subdued emotional state benefits from a different approach. The audiobook runs a little over nine hours, so it also felt like a relatively easy listen to settle into. I loved the fact that this was done with a full cast via duet narration, though the narrators weren’t my favorites. They still did a great job.

Final Opinion

I had a lot of fun with Dance Butterfly Dance. It is messy, dramatic, extremely steamy, and unapologetically committed to its why-choose setup, but what kept me listening was Savy’s journey from someone who believes she has to hide herself to someone who starts demanding to be seen on her own terms.

Jude was unquestionably my favorite, although Beckett’s emotional storyline surprised me, and Asher’s obsession with Butterfly added an interesting layer to the identity secrets. Tate took longer to win me over because of how the relationship begins, but watching his feelings become less calculated made him more interesting as the story progressed.

The book absolutely ends in a way that is designed to make you need the second half of the duet. I finished it frustrated, curious, and very much invested in finding out whether these characters could repair the damage they had caused. For me, that is a pretty good sign that the story did its job.

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