I'm a sucker for novels about women's friendships. SWING TIME centers on a nameless narrator from London and jumps in time from her pre-teen years meeting her best friend Tracey in a dance class to decades later as an assistant to a world-famous pop singer. Smith wades into the story slowly, and it's engrossing the way her first person narration (a first for Smith!) seems almost distant. Usually with first person the reader feels like they're in the narrator's head—but not here. It's first person, but we don't necessarily know what she's thinking; we can only see what she's observing.

The narrator seems haunted by her former friendship (I relate a lot to this). The absence of Tracey on the narrator echoes in the space Smith leaves for the reader. I realized, much later after processing, that while I scoffed at certain revelations toward the end, Smith had put me in the shoes of another character, making judgments. When I look back at my own life and there are moments I exalt as pinnacle and forming, I see now that if I were to tell a stranger who wasn't there about my memory, they might dismiss it as something not that important, something that happened long ago, something that doesn't matter now. But that's the thing about our lived experiences and our memories of them; the people who witnessed you forming, they've seen you, been next to you, at your most malleable. That friend witnessed the horrors of your youth, the embarrassments, the firsts, the best, and the worst, and the myriad complicated emotions between. The complications of friendship are tethered to what was shared, and what cannot be with anyone else. And sometimes it's very difficult to stay connected to those people who knew you then.

And while much of the novel navigates the friendship of Tracey and our narrator through dance (the former quite talented, the latter less so), Smith always entrenches her reader in more than just one subject. There's commentary here on a lot, though Smith allows the space for the reader to come to their own conclusions on much of it—brilliant to experience, really.

Clearly I need to stop, as I started on a tangent without even touching on the MANY other themes! I really enjoyed reading this and spending a lot of time turning it over in my mind and processing it.