THEY'RE GOING TO LOVE YOU

With her father dying, a choreographer must face the betrayal that caused their estrangement nearly two decades earlier.

Carlisle Martin is in her early 40s, scratching out an uncertain living as a choreographer in Los Angeles. (“I can’t, at my age, still be becoming a person, can I?” Carlisle wonders.) One day, an unexpected call comes from James, her father’s partner. James tells Carlisle that her father, Robert, does not have long to live. Despite the fact that Carlisle has been estranged from both men for nearly 19 years, she feels compelled to visit their Bank Street apartment in Greenwich Village to say goodbye. Bank Street plays an outsized role in Carlisle’s imagination. She spent summers there in the 1980s and '90s, ensconced in the world of ballet—where Robert, James, and her mother were fixtures in the 1950s and '60s—and witnessing the impact of the AIDS epidemic on James and Robert’s large circle of friends. But a shocking turn of events when Carlisle is 24 changes her relationship not just with Robert and James, but with her own dreams and ambitions to be a dancer and with her sense of how her life will unfold. Howrey goes back and forth between Carlisle’s present and her past, risking tear-jerking sentiment but landing, like a flawless jeté, on the side of pitch-perfect poignancy. Howrey, a former dancer who joined the Joffrey Ballet when she was just a teenager, writes as movingly about the world of dance as any living author. Even better is her incisive and effortless writing about relationships—between parent and child, between queer lovers—in all their complex mess and beauty. “Agony is ordinary,” thinks Carlisle—this novel is anything but.

Production companies take note: We need a fully choreographed miniseries on a major streaming service ASAP.