This book is phenomenal. This is an emotional page turner. The writing is brilliant. The characters are well developed. This book will stay with me forever

Addicted to this book… As soon as I started to read, I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to put the book down… One hell of a rollercoaster ride.
Brilliant… gripping and addictive, it will pull you in from the first page… A must-read. Covers lots of sensitive subjects also.

I really loved this story.
Full of intrigue, a dark twist and lots of important issues with gay rights and the lgbtq+ community, this story had it all.
Carlisle was such a great character to follow and there were so many beautiful things in this book uncovered.
100% recommend.

There's a lot to love in this book and there's an intriguing and well written story full of pathos and drama. The world of ballet dancer, NY in the 80s, AIDS, family drama.
I loved the style of writing and the storytelling.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

They're Going to Love You is a nicely written story about ballet, complicated family relationships, betrayal, acceptance and forgiveness. Carlisle is the daughter of two professional ballet dancers and grew up with her mother in Ohio, visiting her father in NYC only during school holidays. Her mother Isabel gave up ballet after having Carlisle. Carlisle's father Robert fell madly in love with fellow ballet dancer James and built a life with him, at a time when AIDS was ravaging the gay community in NYC. The book opens with Carlisle taking a ballet class with James, a class that will ultimately lead to a wedge between Carlisle and her father, for reasons not revealed to the reader until much later in the book.

I really enjoyed Howrey's writing. There are some pithy observations and interesting takes on relationships. I had a couple of issues with it though that prevented me from giving it a higher rating.

There's a lot of ballet in it. Meg Howrey is a former professional ballet dancer and actress so this is her area of expertise. For someone with only a passing interest in ballet, it didn't excite me. This is of course a matter of personal taste, suffice to say that if your passion is ballet and/or choreography, you will get more from this book than I did. The theme of containment or restraint runs through the book and by the end, it felt as though the story was hemmed in by it. I was longing for Carlisle to break free. It did feel as though all of the ballet dancers in it were creatively fulfilled but personally disappointed with their lot.

The book hinges on a particular event and the reader is held in suspense for much of the book. When the reveal comes, I was completely underwhelmed to the point where I assumed there must be something else coming, because this couldn't possibly be what caused the rift. The suspense was overdone.

In short, a solid, well-written read with one element overplayed unnecessarily. 3/5 stars

*Many thanks to the author, publisher @bloomsburypublishing and @netgalley for the ARC. They're Going to Love You was published on 10 November 2022.*

Gosh, this is an intense, clever, and powerful read. Threading between the present day and 80's New York, the reader is immersed into a world of dance and drama, and to the AIDS ridden tragedy of New York in the 80's, especially in the art worlds where funerals were more frequent than parties. Not a light read, but a complete page turner that is written with incredible skill - highly reccomend this

Why oh why am I only allowed to give this novel 5 stars? This novel is achingly, heart rending-ly beautiful and even after finishing the novel yesterday I am still thinking and worrying about Carlisle like she’s a real person.
There is so much to unpack in this novel and it will speak to different readers in very different ways. A young person coming of age, a child of divorced parents, finding out your parent is gay, being a dancer or indeed being involved in any creative activity, being a single woman, female friendships, finding love, being a parent, and for Carlisle: being someone’s number one and most important person. It should be a really depressing read but somehow it isn’t. The pure joy of ballet, of being at one with your physical body runs through the book as a tight thread with using your creativity to contribute to the dance world that you love is entwined with it.
There is a secret hidden in the narrative of why Carlisle and her father are not on speaking terms and usually that is what would propel me to keep on reading but in this novel there was more than enough happening in Carlisle’s present day life that I wasn’t distracted by the secret and desperate to uncover it. When it came it was well worth waiting for.
The last page came far too quickly but I’m not sure I’d ever have been ready to finish it.

They're Going to Love You
by Meg Howrey

Achingly beautiful story set in the world of ballet in New York City from the 80s when the AIDs epidemic was decimating the gay community to present day. Recently I am beginning to realise how intrigued I am with the world of dancing. It is so obvious from her writing that the author is not a stranger to this life. What rings through her work is the devotion, the mental attitude required, the unwavering commitment to slowly transform ones body into the natural, yet utterly feminine positions demanded. She describes what it is to be a ballerina body and soul, physiologically, mentally, spiritually. Even her idioms and metaphors are balletic.

Her thoughts on how men look at women, and how women look at themselves being looked at gave me lots to think about.

Carlisle is desperate to be someone's best love. Her life comprises of triangles. In every relationship she is only one point in that triangle. We understand that something has happened in her life that has created a rift between herself, her father and her father's life long lover and recent husband. We understand her difficult relationship with her mother. Slowly throughout the arc of the story we begin to understand what went wrong, and through analysing the traits that a person needs to be a serious ballet dancer, self discipline, devotion, solitude, containment, we also begin to understand why.

Carlisle receives a phone call which forces her to reflect on the nineteen years she was absent from her father's life. Her inner narrative is so telling, her instant contradiction of autoplatitudes. Things said in anger, things said in shame, managing the tension between sparing another of remorse and burying yourself in blame. What did she do that was so awful? Or was she a victim of a contained upbringing and an absolutist father?

With stunning insights Howrey captures the complications and brokenness of this father/ daughter relationship in excruciating accuracy. This story broke my heart but put it back together again.

Publication date: 10th November 2022
Thank you to #netgalley and #bloomsburypublishing for the ARC

A beautifully written novel which interweaves an exploration of creativity with the story of an estranged family. Carlisle, her mother, her father and his partner are all ballet dancers. Growing up with her mother and her new family, Carlisle rarely sees her father and his partner, James. When she does she is in awe of their home and cultured life in New York. She learns from James in particular about life and art. In adulthood, an event leads to her estrangement from them.

Carlisle quotes her mother's former mentor, who highlights that ballet is about simple, pure emotion - "there are no mothers-in-law in ballet'. The four protagonists are better at creating art than they are at negotiating the nuances of adult relationships. This is the theme Carlisle comes back to, in her work as a choreographer, and finally as she comes to terms with past events and confronts her father's death.

A literary, introspective novel exploring a lifelong quest to fulfil expectations, overcome generational trauma, and find your own feet.

In what is at times almost a stream of consciousness, 42 year old narrator Carlisle is going back to New York for the first time in a long time. We learn early on that a rift has grown between herself and her father Robert, and his partner James, but it isn’t until later in the book that we find out why.

The timeline shifts between the 80s of Carlisle’s childhood, in the midst of the AIDS crisis which she didn’t yet understand, to the near present 2016, with vignettes from the intervening years.

There is a lot about the dance world here, and at times it seems like we’re reading a memoir, as many of the events are real, but told from the perspective of fictional characters. Carlisle’s mother Isabel danced in George Balanchine’s company, and the characters frequent authentic places and talk about books, plays and music in a genuine way.
This all lends a strong authenticity that makes you feel like these are real characters. The New York setting so familiar from films and books also renders a genuine feeling.
Told with the grace and strength that ballet requires, and fosters.

I started this one on a whim, I had read the blurb when I requested it from NetGalley but I was actually just looking to start a new read and picked it for the title. It jumped straight into the ballet studio and as I’ve recently taken up classes it appealed to me instantly.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read this title in exchange for my feedback.

I was enraptured by Meg Howrey's last novel, The Wanderers, a brilliantly dead-pan but richly thoughtful story that followed three astronauts training for a Mars mission in the Utah desert. They're Going To Love You is a very different kind of book, both in style and substance. Carlisle trained as a ballet dancer in New York, relying heavily on the support of her father Robert and his long-term partner, James. In the wake of the 1980s AIDS crisis, she watched them both uneasily, reassured by their monogamy but haunted by the sudden deaths of young men they knew. The novel skips between Carlisle's past and the present [c.2016], where we learn that Carlisle, now a choreographer, has been estranged from both Robert and James for nineteen years, after her father forbade her to contact them. But what did Carlisle do that has plunged her into feeling like a person who is 'only fit for a solo' and was never worthy of being 'loved best' by anybody?

Ballet has been served badly by fiction: most ballet novels I've read emphasise the tortured nature of the art and how masochistic you must be to want to devote your life to it. Howrey, a former professional dancer, presents a much more nuanced view. (I'm now keen to read her earlier novel The Cranes Dance, which sounds like it's solely focused on ballet, which They're Going To Love You is not). Carlisle never danced professionally, partly because of her height - at one point she reflects bitterly that if she'd been a man, with her talent, she'd have been a success - and partly because she didn't feel the utter devotion she believed she needed. But her experience of the ballet world doesn't fit into neat stereotypes, nor does her career as a choreographer seem like a second best - indeed, as Howrey emphasises, female ballet choreographers are much rarer than ballerinas. Her rift with her family is also handled beautifully, with no character egregiously in the wrong, although I certainly felt that some carried more fault than others. I doubt this will be memorable in the way that The Wanderers was, with Carlisle's first-person voice already slipping from me. Nevertheless, it's still all too rare to read a novel that stars an ambitious, childless woman who isn't punished for her perversity.

Meg Howrey immerses the reader in the world of ballet, art and the price it exacts, ambition, love, identity, the tangled complex nature of family dynamics and relationships, forgiveness, and identity, in this character driven novel. Howrey's background as a professional dancer informs the narrative that shifts from the past and the present, set in New York City during the 1980s amidst the despair and devastation of the Aids Crisis. Carlisle Martin lives in Ohio with her mother after the end of her parents short lived marriage, as a child feeling very much the outsider, she lives for the time, a few prized weeks, she spent with her father, Robert, and his long term partner, James, at their Bank Street home. She is drawn particularly to James and all that she learns from him, dazzled by the glamour of their NYC lifestyle, she desires nothing more than to be with them all of the time, seeking to be loved and to belong.

In the present, Carlisle is in her 40s, whilst fiercely wanting to be a ballet dancer when she was younger, she has built a career as a professional choreographer in her 40s, and she has been estranged from her father for two decades. She now learns that Robert is dying, and although it takes a little too long, we finally discover out what lies at the heart of their separation. This is a story of New York, passion, betrayal, grief, and forgiveness, a family legacy rooted in dance, health, identity and personal development. Howrey takes us right into Carlisle's head and her thoughts, capturing her drive and obsession, and how she eventually manages to carve her own place in a profession that is both challenging and demanding, where sacrifices are a necessity.

This will appeal to readers drawn to and are interested in ballet and the culture of the profession, and how lives are shaped by it, and the repercussions of the obsession it breeds. However, it is far from a completely satisfying read, it has pacing issues, and the reasons that lies behind Carlisle and Robert's separation through such a long time to me seemed to be rather over played. However, I did find it an engaging and engrossing read, particularly when it came to familial relationships, love, the heartbreak, the flawed characters, the aids crisis, and the richly detailed insights into the world of ballet. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

They're Going to Love You by Meg Howrey is an enjoyable novel about a daughter's relationship with her father and his partner and about the feeling that you are not the person that anybody loves best.

I absolutely adore novels set in the dance world so I knew this was a must have for acquisition. I am so excited to follow Carlisle thoughts and her place as a professional ballet dancer in NYC. I’m excited for all the twist and turns and to read about the call that essentially changes the course of her life. I think this would be great for a book club as well. More thoughts to share and a full review coming very soon.


Carlisle Martin dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer like her mother Isabel. She only gets to see her father Robert, and his brilliant but troubled partner James, for a few precious weeks a year when she visits their enchanted apartment in Greenwich Village. James educates her in all that he holds dear in life: literature, music, and most of all, dance. As the years go by, Carlisle is desperate to be asked to stay permanently, even as AIDS brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair creates a rift between them, with devastating consequences that reverberate for decades to come. Nineteen years later, Carlisle receives a phone call which unravels the fateful events of her life . . .

They're Going to Love You is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision and a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist, and the price of forgiveness, of ambition, and of love.