I really struggled to get invested in this story. Even though the writing was beautiful, the pacing just felt very slow and weighed down with a lot of ballet descriptions. As it progressed, and particularly once Alex entered the picture, the story became much more interesting to me and kept me engaged through the remainder of the book. Overall, the sense that I was just waiting for the inevitable (her father’s death) did little to keep me invested until the drama of the past, which was hinted at throughout the first 70% of the story, was finally addressed.

Thank you for the opportunity to review this title.
I enjoyed the elements of the story relating to ballet as this is something I have little knowledge of, but would have appreciated more of this element and less of the melodramatic depictions of the relationships between the characters. On a very personal note, I do not enjoy stories where the whole plot could have been avoided with some simple adult communication between characters, and I felt this novel to be like this. I also felt that a lot of the first half of the novel was overwritten and unnecessary - it seemed like quite a build up to “the event” and then quickly rushing to the end and the “resolution”.

This book, like it's cover, is absolutely stunning. I didn't know much about his book before picking it up and I was wowed the entire time. I love family drama and this one had plenty. I loved the details about the dance world, the father/daughter relationship, the coming of age story, the AIDS crisis and so much more. This was like reading a book of art. Beautiful and will definitely be included in my top 10 of the year.

Ballet + betrayal + love + loss + family relationships + NYC in the 80s + the AIDS crisis + art + passion = a beautifully written, must-read story.

Unfortunately I was not able to finish this title. While I really did love the main character’s observations on life and love, especially as a teenager, I found that for me most of the story felt too slow to develop. I think perhaps I was just the wrong audience for this book because I do not have an appreciation for ballet. I do think it was beautifully written and thoughtful and may pick it up at another time to try again.

4.5. This carries the same mournful energy that The Great Believers does, and it's a beautiful story following Carlisle's fraught and tender relationship with her father and his partner. The dance world that they are all immersed in together was so well fleshed-out, and I felt connected to and sympathetic for every character in this story. My most complicated emotions were for Carlisle herself, and I grappled with understanding and disliking her before returning to compassion. Overall a gorgeous story with an intense emotional impact, and I really loved the audio!

This novel starts in the present day with main character Carlisle, who is in her 40s, being summoned by her dad’s partner James to come see him, as her dad, who she has been estranged from for 19 years, is dying. The book then flashes back to Carlisle’s childhood through her early 20s, interspersed with moments of her in the present day, much of it centered on the short time each year that she would leave her mom in Ohio to spend time with her dad and James in NYC, and eventually, towards the end of the book, we finally find out what happened to rupture her relationship with her dad.

It’s part coming of age novel, part family drama - and, with just about all the characters, including Carlisle herself, being either current or former ballet dancers or choreographers, steeped in the world of ballet. I know pretty much nothing about ballet, but still found those parts very interesting.

It’s definitely a quiet book, and a slow starter, but the writing is just beautiful, and the characters are unique and indelible. And the ending was just so great and emotionally powerful.

If you like quiet literary novels, or authors like Lily King, highly recommend this one.

This is a book about dance and love. It’s also a book about family - biological and chosen. It’s about health - mental and physical. It’s a book about passion as well. It’s a tough read at times, but ultimately a redeeming one. It’ll stay with me.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

I quit ballet early (I had “bad feet” and also “didn’t like it”), but started early, so I danced long enough to learn about Balanchine hands. It’s a hand position popularized by choreographer George Balanchine that’s meant to be refined and controlled, but also expressive. It has to look soft, but could never really be soft. Four fingers are delicately curved, but to near rigidity, thoughtfully counterweighted by the placement of the thumb. They are graceful; they are not limp. They’re alive and calculated. Some people call them Balanchine claws.

They’re Going to Love You is elegant in this way. Carlisle, it’s narrator, is a 40ish choreographer (and ballet nepo baby?) who precisely goes about her work, her art, and her life, often to please others. “I’m good at assuring people I don’t need anything from them,” she says, “and for a while doing so makes me feel pretty great about myself.”

She grows up between her mother in LA and her father in New York. Her mother, a retired and disillusioned dancer, has a new husband and a young son she seems to love more easily than she does Carlisle. Her father, a lauded choreographer, is remarried and navigating the despair of the AIDS crisis with his ballet teacher partner, James. They mostly treat Carlisle like an adult. She does her best to pretend she is one.

Carlisle is too tall to be a dancer, like her mother, but she loves to dance. As a teen she stays with her father and James at their beautiful home in New York, where she has they chance to take classes and seek their approvals for her dancing, as well as her lack of need. She loves the place deeply, until she makes a decision that results in a falling out with her father. When the book begins, they haven’t spoken each other in 20 years. He’s dying.

Meg Howrey’s descriptions of the ballet world, the bodies and the movements, are vivid. Her history as a professional dancer is clear in her specificity and her knowledge of pain. She quotes Balanchine, saying, “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet.” In other words, there’s no room for working out families and their complex relationships. But repeatedly Carlisle ponders on “undanceable things” and tries to make them expressible, controllable, to fit them into her hands. Her relationship with her mother, her want to be the person someone loves most, her possibly cutthroat creative ambition- all of it she’d like to contain in a dance. Her dancing makes up for the things she can’t talk through, even at her father’s deathbed.

But what she’s commissioned for is much more simplistic, a ballet about monsters. She takes it, for the money, but finds herself struggling to care. Claws are less interesting when they’re allowed to look like claws.

What a marvelous novel that encapsulates the messy and painful experience of growing up. Carlisle's story slightly broke my heart as she weaved her way through forgotten dreams, the harsh reality of idol worship, and needing to grieve someone living. All of this set within the bright and blinding world of ballet made for a captivating read. 100/10 would recommend!

Although I began to read this book because it was reported to be about ballet and dance, I ended up loving it because of the characters. Carlisle seems to have it all, (even though her all is different from most) and yet it ends in an estrangement that lasts for years. The book deals with what leads up to the estrangement, which is probably the most traumatic incident in her life. Although the book does not have a "happy" ending, it does have a satisfying ending, which makes the whole read worth it. The insights into the dance world and the AIDS infused gay world of Greenwich Village in the 1980s make the book seem that much more authentic.

Meg Howrey still does ballet better than anyone. The opening scene in THE CRANES DANCE, where the main character takes you through the absolutely bonkers plot of SWAN LAKE is some of the best character-building sports writing ever. The arc of this book is soft and slow and sweet and really really really sad. It's a perfectly grown-up novel that shows Howrey has range, and still writes dance like no one else.

Meg Howrey transported us into the world of ballet, so if you are a dancer this read will be perfect for you. However, as an outsider to the dance world I still really enjoyed this story as it was more about complicated family dynamics, the journey of creating a life you love, and forgiveness.

Carlisle Martin always had dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer. Her mother was one and her father and his partner James were both successful leaders in the industry. However, living in Ohio with her mom, she craved the few weeks she would spend on Bank Street in NYC with her father Robert, and James. Her main desire as a young girl was to stay in their orbit and be included in their world.

The story begins as we see 40-year-old Carlisle receive a phone call that takes us on the journey of uncovering why it’s been 19 years since she’s seen her father.

This story took from New York City during the AIDS crisis to present-day LA. 
It was moving to get a glimpse into the experiences the gay community was facing during that time.

“Having to struggle doesn’t necessarily make you interesting, it might just make you tired”

All Carlisle wanted was to be the person someone loved best. Whether that was from her father, mother, James, or her partner. We assume partners will always make the right decisions but they are just as flawed. We often only receive fragments of people and are forced to make sense of the rest.

The reasoning for their rift was unexpected and complicated. But I appreciated how the story ended. Life can result in so much wreckage but we still can have a life that is meaningful and loving despite it.

A slow burn tragedy revolving around abandonment, the world of ballet, and yearning to belong. Carlisle grows up in the world of ballet. Her parents are separated, but both distinguished in the world of ballet. Her mother is preoccupied with her younger half-brother, and her father is dedicated to the survival of him and his partner, James, in New York in the midst of the AIDS crisis. It’s truly heartbreaking realizing Carlisle is no one’s favorite person, a visitor in her own family. The writing is lyrical and smooth, building up to an unraveling family. The author, Howrey, is a former dancer herself and it shows with the passion and emotion she brings to describing dance sequences to describe the emotional state of her characters. However, her strongest writing is when she slowly sits with the character’s darker emotions, particularly loneliness, grief, and betrayal. “A particular kind of glory that happens when we share our suffering and are seen… An exaltation. I’m loath to connect womanness with suffering, or suffering with greatness, but there it is.”

Dual timelines in the professional dance world take the reader from 1970s New York to present day Los Angeles. The main character, Carlisle was raised by divorced parents who were both professional dancers. She spent a few weeks during the summer at her father’s brownstone in New York City that he shared with his partner, James. Hoping to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a Balanchine dancer, Carlisle dedicates herself to a career in ballet.

A beautifully written story about the arts,creativity, family, ambition and love. Heartbreaking and expertly told by an author who writes with such fluidity and grace. Meg Howrey conveys the cost of being a success and the complex relationships between parents and children.

Carlisle Martin, the daughter of a former Balanchine ballerina and a choreographer, grows up in Ohio but always considers her father’s Greenwich Village brownstone on Bank Street her home, even though she only spends a short time there each year with him and his partner, James. Although her father is demanding and aloof, the warm-hearted James provides her an education in dance, literature, and music.

Thus influenced, Carlisle attends boarding school for dance, even though her tall stature would have disqualified most from ballet then goes on to college always thinking of landing in New York City. However, on an errand for James, who is more troubled than she realizes, Carlisle embarks on an affair that devastates her relationship with her father and James. After nineteen years of estrangement, a phone call takes her back to the summer everything changed and forces her to reevaluate herself and her choices and decide if she should forgive her father and herself for what happened.

Set both in New York City during the AIDS crisis and in the present, THEY’RE GOING TO LOVE YOU is intense, beautiful, and heartbreaking, though with a satisfying and comforting ending. The narrator is exactly my age so added to everything else positive about the book, I felt a lot of nostalgia about the cultural references. Carlisle’s relationship with both her parents is strained, and I appreciate seeing this realistic depiction in novels. In the book, memories, not always accurate, are repeated until they become the truth, and the characters are imprisoned in these stories they’ve generated, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. The ballets, too, are stories, and I enjoyed reading about how choreographers go about telling these stories through music and dance.

If you enjoy literary fiction in the vein of Rebecca Makkai or books about family, forgiveness, and/or dance, I highly recommend this novel!

What this book did very well was giving the reader a peak into the world of ballet, 1980s New York, family, and the AIDS epidemic. What I had issues with was sometimes it felt overly verbose, and the reason behind the separation between Robert and Carlisle, took way too long to be revealed, and once revealed, it was less than satisfying. There were moments that I loved, but overall, something felt off.

As a former dancer, I was so excited to get a copy of this book, and while it started out with a lot of promise, ultimately it was just average for me. The pacing is very slow, and the writing was a bit disjointed. I did get sucked into the story very quickly, but the last 30% seemed to drag, which soured me on the reading experience. I wish the author had done more with the AIDS storyline. It definitely felt thrown in, rather than a real part of the story. Much of the book is spent in suspense for the reveal of the Carlisle’s great betrayal, but I feel like I didn’t get it. It was nothing that should have left a father and daughter estranged for 19 years, and I kept waiting for something else to happen. Overall, this was a good book, but unfortunately had too much wasted potential to really be great.

Carlisle Martin is a ballerina and the daughter of professional dancers. Her mother settled in Ohio after becoming pregnant, but her father, Robert, choreographs ballets in New York, where he lives with his partner, James. Every year, Carlisle visits them in Greenwich Village, spending a few weeks being enchanted and educated by their world. Then the AIDS epidemic hits and Carlisle looks on as the men experience profound grief, while navigating their own artistic careers and grappling with a society that maligns their pain and fear.

As Carlisle grows older, her likelihood of dancing professionally becomes less realistic, despite her talent and training… because she is tall. Her height is in a way its own character in this book, as I can attest is sometimes the case in real life. #tallgirl 🙋🏻‍♀️ She reflects on if she *wants it* badly enough, and wonders if perhaps she is missing the thing that those who make it have - not the talent but the want.

The third act is dedicated to a betrayal in the relationship between Carlisle and her Greenwich Village family; and the 19 year estrangement that follows. During that time, she builds a career that’s complex in its disappointments and glass ceiling breaks. Finally, Carlisle returns to New York, to her father’s deathbed. Can she make peace with Robert and James while there’s time?

This is a journey of forgiveness, asking why we don’t offer it and seek it sooner. Of artists’ endless and insatiable longing to create something beautiful and questioning what “success” looks like. The author details imposter syndrome in the arts like nothing I’ve ever read. The realities of a career in performance, the heartbreak and highs of it. Trying to be good in so many ways and not feeling sure if we’re ever getting it right. I connected to so much in this book and really, really enjoyed it.

The pages turn themselves in this well-crafted novel about love, betrayal, and exoneration. It is poetic and lovely and unlike anything else I’ve read. Thank you @netgalley and @doubledaybooks for the ARC of this beauty, out now.

4.5 ⭐️
CW: suicide, mental illness, homophobia

Loved the setting, the dreams and the family dynamics! This will stick with me. I really enjoy ballet/dance related books so cherry on top!