Review: "Flirty Dancing" by Jennifer Moffatt

Flirty Dancing by Jennifer Moffatt
Published May 2025 via St. Martin's Griffin
★★★★

Archer is living his dream—sort of. A few months ago, he gave up his dreary desk job to pursue a career in dance. But he's struck out time and time again, and he's perilously close to having to return to Ohio and to one of those dreary desk jobs. When saving grace comes, it's in an unexpected form: a queer resort in the Catskills. And his once-upon-a-time crush happens to be working there too...

"Well, stop standing there like you carried a watermelon. Grab a beer," Betty said, nodding at the fridge. (loc. 329*)

If I'm honest, I read this for the Dirty Dancing retelling. Luckily, this is one of those retellings that is smart about it (I'm a broken record on this, but what can you do)—rather than a straight (pun intended) retelling, Flirty Dancing is inspired by Dirty Dancing but deviates as necessary to make for a better story. (After all, cultural context doesn't always translate; both the 60s, when DD is set, and the 80s, when it was written, are a long way off from the 2020s.) Archer is, loosely, the Baby of the story, but he's an employee rather than a resort guest, and when Mateo (the Johnny of the book) scorns Archer's naïveté, it's not because he thinks Archer is talentless or incompetent, but just that he is, well, sometimes a little naïve.

Overall, this makes for a cute, entertaining read. Mateo has some baggage to sort through, and Archer spends much of the book in need of a confidence boost, but the cast of characters is lively, and even the people who turn out to have...fewer scruples than others...are allowed to have some complexity rather than being written off as bad apples.

This doesn't outshine Dirty Dancing, but it's a solid twist on a much-loved story. It'll be interesting to see what Moffatt does next.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.