Kitty St. Clair's Last Dance

Author: Kate Robb Title: Kitty St. Clair's Last Dance Publisher: The Dial Press Date Published: 09/30/2025

Read Dates: 08/26/2025- 08/27/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

 📖 I received a gifted e-book ARC. The following is my honest review✍🏻

Kitty St. Clair’s Last Dance is a single POV, magical realism second-chance romance. Jules works as an assistant in a nursing home, and is shocked when a resident, Kitty St. Clair, wills her a dilapidated dance hall. The building has the potential to make Jules’ dreams come true, but it brings with it a lot of conflicting feelings, not limited to the potential buyer, Reeve, a man from her past who wants a second chance. Jules finds Kitty’s diary and, hoping for answers, peeks inside, only to find herself transported through dreams to Kitty’s past. Jules needs to figure out what her dreams mean and find the right path forward with Reeve and the dance hall for her future. I have thoroughly enjoyed the Kate Robb books I’ve read, and this one is no exception! I love her blend of contemporary romance and magical realism. I found Reeve very relatable, as someone who has a job instead of a calling, and I liked him a lot. I loved the dream sequences and a chance to see Kitty in the past, and how they helped guide Jules to figure out how to pursue her passions.

When Jules finds out that Kitty St. Clair, a resident at the retirement home where she works, has passed away and bequeathed her a dilapidated dance hall in their quaint and picturesque lakeside community, Jules is surprised. Kitty St. Clair was as eccentric as she was glamorous, but Jules cannot figure out why Kitty left her an abandoned building. 

That is until Reeve, a charming, successful developer, returns to town, looking for the new owner of the dance hall, intent on turning it into luxury vacation condos. Suddenly Jules has a way to make her lifelong dream of going to med school a reality. But selling the dance hall will only add to the steadily rising real estate prices and make it harder for residents of her tiny vacation town to live there, not to mention, Reeve also happens to be the man who Jules shared a magical night with two summers ago-- and never heard from again. 

Reeve wants a second chance with Jules and is determined to earn back her trust. But can she let herself fall for him again? Does he want her, or a guaranteed sale? 

Jules wishes she could talk to Kitty, who always seemed to have the best advice, so she turns to the diary she left her. But as Jules falls asleep reading, she wakes up in the world of the diary, fifty years ago, accompanying a young Kitty to the dance hall in all its glory. Her dream visits to Kitty’s past begin to parallel the questions plaguing her in her own world. Will Kitty’s past hold the keys to unlocking Jules’s future?