Why did I wait so long to read this incredible novel?? THEY’RE GOING TO LOVE YOU is a gorgeous mediation on friendships, art, parents, and complicated relationships. It is such a beautiful book, with turns of phrases that stopped me in my tracks and a story that moved me. As a former dancer, I was thrown right back into the highs and lows of the dance world, and as a former New Yorker, I loved spending time in the artistic side of the Village and Lincoln Center (my favorite place in the city). This is a must read if you love good literary fiction, dance, NYC in the 90s, and complicated daughter/father stories.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

I love ballet and stories set within it. While I know this is often the case, this book was unfortunately a bit too steeped in the melancholy and pain of that world, and was somewhat tough to read.

They're Going to Love You by Meg Howrey is surprising, lovely, painful, and enduring. I loved this book so much! Carlisle was so incredibly human that it made me love all of her unlikeable qualities. The theme around ballet and seeing mundane life as a form of dance made my heart swell. Absolutely beautiful. I can't wait to see what Meg Howrey writes next. Thank you to Doubleday and NetGalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

I know whenever I book has this style cover that I'm going to gobble it up.

This book was refreshing and poetic, and the world of ballet was such a nice journey to someone who knows nothing about it. And in NYC? Yes please! It also shone light on complicated familial relationships which I love. Brilliant writing, captivating characters. It was so good.

This book was so enthralling! Heartbreaking, yet tender. I thought the past and present timeline was well done. I'm definitely not a ballet lover, but the writing made me enjoy the story.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC.

A complicated, yet good novel about family and love. The reader has to be patience and to the story from the about ballet fall into place. The novel is a good selection for discussion groups.

A new favorite! I loved everything about this book, and found myself falling for these characters very quickly. I enjoyed her writing style so much I went searching for her previous books, on a mission to read all her writing. Recommending this to everyone!

This book is a beautifully written example of broken and hurtful family dynamics. It examines these relationships closely, and cleverly merges feelings of pain, loneliness, acceptance, and forgiveness, holding space for each. Beautifully weaved into the dance scene in a New York City suffering from the AIDs Crisis in the 80's, this is a stunning coming-of-age that makes you think hard about how to learn yourself and how to learn to love your family.

This was a beautifully written novel, which took place in a time period I am always open to reading and learning more about. I thought the language in this book was inspired and so well through out. I look forward to sharing this with my book clubs.

“Shame lets you know you’re in the wrong, which is why you should trust it. Incorrect. Shame is the bullet of judgment and anyone can wield that gun.”
I usually don't love stories about dancers or about women with daddy issues, but I found this to be beautiful. There were so many poignant lines that transcended the plot and spoke directly to my soul. Absolutely gorgeous read.

I will forever love the melodramatic novels, and this one tugs so fervently at my heartstrings.

A woman is battling the news of her father’s impending death, and how she’ll navigate the 19 year rift between them. Perhaps this is fitting for me because of the current rift I’m experiencing with my mother, but this novel explores what it means to forgive and reconcile even if things go unsaid. I adored this book.

LOVED this - evocative, moving, and graceful. Any artist of any media will understand and likely see small bits of themselves in the main character, and just in the story itself. There's some great commentary about family, loss, being betrayed. Truly packs a punch.

I was so engaged in this world from the start. I have always been fascinated with stories of the dance world - particularly ballet - and having it set during this period added such a complex layer to that microcosm. I have recently bought the hardcopy of this book and read it again.

They're Going to Love You is a tender and heartbreaking story that captures nuance of family tension and coming of age. The writing is poetic and lyrical, which perfectly mirrors the story. This one surprised me and is a can't miss.

Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday Books for the ARC - They're Going to Love You is out now!

Thank you so much to netgalley for a review copy of They’re Going to Love You in exchange for an honest review 🫶 God, I was gasping at the last 20 or so pages of this book nonstop. The drama was intense! I really loved the portrayal of movement and dance in this, as a theater kid it really made me miss the whole rehearsal process, the act of putting together a show and loving all of the little backstage moments the audience doesn’t get to see, trying to make all of the moving parts and the jumbled ideas in your head come to life. Although I found this a bit slow to start, and some of the thematic elements to be unfocused at times, overall I really enjoyed this and it is one of the most dramatic things I’ve read in a while. (in a very good way)

This one is a quiet burn, the kind of novel that leads to a swell of deep and intense emotion at the end. You’re left, Reader, with a sense of loss at the end, a feeling that you’ve experienced something very intimate, that maybe you shouldn’t have, but you had to — and you did — and now you’re left to think about the memory of the novel. They’re Going to Love You sticks in your mind like taffy to the roof of your mouth, a lingering taste of sweet and salty. Maybe a little sour.

They’re Going to Love You is a story about parenting, being a child, being a child to parents who are human and flawed. It is also a story about the fragility of relationships and the unpredictable strength of them. It’s a story about the trials of family, the values that are assumed in a family unit, assumed because of blood and marriage and birth. It is also a story of betrayal and grief, of not having what we assume we should have or of losing what we felt we should never have been able to lose.

The novel revolves around and is narrated through the eyes of a young girl who becomes a young woman and then a middle aged woman. She is a dancer and the daughter of dancers, ballet dancers in the heady and chaotic New York city scene of the mid-twentieth century. The father is a gay man, openly so, and there is a step-father. Then there is her mother, a former ballerina. The parents expect a lot from the girl. This is a story about expectations and hopes and dreams that are ours and also, not our own.

As the girl grows up there are things she learns about her privileged life and the expectations of her privileged life and the ways in which people look at her from outside her life. She learns about love from her parents and from their divorce and from their forced interactions on her account. She learns about love from her father’s gay friends. She learns about betrayal from her parents and what it means to forgive.

The novel is also about death and the finiteness of this life and of love. It is about realities underlying the fantasy of a ballet-infused, performed life.

Howrey’s prose is stark and cutting. It is dark and yet also childish, implying childhood is in fact a darker space and time than we are often led to believe. The characters are children and adults and you are not sure who is the adult and who is the child sometimes. The dialogue is authentic, sometimes painfully so, too reminiscent of our own familial traumas.

There is an element of this book that prickled me, for as much as I praise it: the characters are insufferably privileged. They are white, wealthy, part of the exclusive milieu of pretentious NYC. The main character is a nepo baby, whether she thinks so or not. So is her father. Intergenerational privilege abounds in this novel. This is a world that exists for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the world’s population. It’s not my world, for sure.

But, that is what novels are for (in part): entries into worlds unknown.

A solid and immensely readable piece by Howrey. This is a story of Carlisle, a child of ballet dancers and a ballet dancer herself. We dance back and forth from her childhood to her current life in her 40s. The beginning of the story focuses on building the characters of her father (Robert), his partner (James), and her mother (Isabel), and dives deep into the AIDS crisis, performance culture, and mental illness. We find out why Carlisle has been estranged from her father for 19 years. We laugh. We cry.

I did have a bit of an issue with the reveal of the reason for estrangement. With so much build up, I was a little let down.

I still think it deserves 4 stars. Cheers to complicated relationships with parents.

Honestly, I was incredibly surprised that I liked this book as much as I did. I'm not normally one who likes modern-age books filled with pages full of fluff writing that tries to pass itself off as being poetic and introspective, like this book definitely did. I didn't even love the big secret plot twist that caused the big rift between Carlisle and her dad; I thought it was corny and honestly SUPER overly dramatic.

And yet... I really did enjoy reading this. Will I pick it up again? Probably not. Will I remember anything about it in another month (other than the fact that I envisioned James to be Martin Short for some reason)? Not a chance. But it still was interesting enough to hold my attention, and there were some parts that actually made me a little teary-eyed. Thinking about being alive during the AIDS epidemic, especially while envisioning myself with a gay father, made me truly feel for Carlisle and everyone who had to experience such a thing.

Definitely won't be a book that everyone will love or appreciate, but I think it definitely is worth at least a try!

Thank you to Net Galley, the author, and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I thought I would love this book more than I did. Back in the early-to-mid 2000s, I was all about a dance movie. It was a good time to be alive. We had Center Stage. We had Black Swan. We had Save the Last Dance. These kinds of narratives HIT. I was expecting that dormant fascination with dance culture to really emerge as I read this.

And yet, I wasn't really invested in the dance-related elements of this plot at all. That's likely on me. I know Meg Howrey is a dancer, herself. So, people who are more familiar with dance/ballet beyond a surface-level of understanding (and whose repertoire of dance media includes more than the dramas I mentioned) were likely able to appreciate her knowledge on the topic more than I did.

That being said, what I was captivated by were the characters and the complex dynamics between them. The story follows Carlisle Martin, a woman who has been estranged from her father and his partner, James, for roughly 19 years. We're not clued into why that is for quite some time, which held my interest throughout. I really wanted to know the source of this tension between them. James reaches out to Carlisle to inform her that Robert is dying. And it is for this reason that Carlisle is forced to revisit everything that transpired between them.

I think Meg Howrey did an excellent job of creating characters that I felt invested in. I cared about James, despite not agreeing with much of what he said and did throughout. I empathized with Robert, despite finding his actions to be pretty emotionally immature. I felt incredibly bad for Carlisle, who spent the entire story - even in adulthood - feeling like she wasn't someone that anyone loved the most. Her father's idea of family was his partner. Her mother's new husband and child evoked a different sort of love and bond. And while all of these people were so incredibly important to her, she is (in various ways) mistreated by all of them.

That part of this story is the reason I'm giving it 3 stars. I don't think Meg Howrey's writing style is my personal favorite. While I understand why more time and attention was given to other aspects of the story, I really was just in it for the family drama.