They're Going to Love You

September 1, 2022

Howrey (The Wanderers) places her story about family relationships within the specialized world of dance, confronting divorce, gender identity, physical and mental limitations, the classical vs. the modern, and becoming a whole person in a fraught world. Robert and Isobel were both professional ballet dancers, and their daughter Carlisle wanted to follow in their footsteps. However, being almost six feet tall and lacking the ballerina's inner drive, she is struggling to find a new path. Her parents divorced early in her life when Robert admitted he was gay and in love with a dance teacher named James. Isobel has since remarried and had another child, while Robert and James have a lovely apartment in Greenwich Village where Carlisle spends vacations and one delightful summer. Then Carlisle and Robert have a major falling out that results in a 19-year estrangement. When James calls to tell Carlisle that Robert is dying, she must come to terms with the kind of person she wants to be, in order to say a proper good-bye to him. VERDICT A story of family and identity, nicely framed with the world of ballet, that readers of coming-of-age stories and general fiction will appreciate.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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Starred review from September 19, 2022
Howrey (The Wanderers) delivers a poignant family story of alienation, regret, and desire. Carlisle Martin, 43, a Los Angeles choreographer, has learned that her father, Robert, whom she hasn’t seen for 19 years, is dying. As the daughter of two professional ballet dancers, Carlisle was a natural talent, and was especially driven to impress the astute Robert and his effusive partner, James, a ballet teacher. Growing up, she visited Robert and James two weeks a year (from her home in Ohio with her mother), relishing in the magic of their decadent Greenwich Village home. She especially craved James’s stories and strived to be closer to the pair. As she narrates in a flashback of her life at 24: “My father, I love, and James I sort of want to be. Maybe I mean: have?” But then she did something Robert won’t forgive her for (the details of which don’t come out till much later), and went on to build a career without the help of her family. Now, she learns she might inherit Robert and James’s house, according to the terms of her grandfather’s trust, causing a painful flood of memories and tension with the couple, whom she assumes want her to give the house to James. The fraught scenes provoke staggering bursts of emotion, such as a flashback to Carlisle at 12 returning from New York to Ohio and realizing she doesn’t feel like she belongs with her mother’s new family. Howrey expertly builds tension, leading the reader to feel alongside Carlisle both the draw of ballet and her anxiety about her reunion with her father. It’s a breathtaking performance. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

Starred review from October 15, 2022
In this novel about devotion, art, and love in many forms, fortysomething Carlisle is working as a freelance choreographer in Los Angeles when her father's husband, James, calls to tell her that her father is dying. She hasn't spoken to her father, Robert, in nearly 20 years. As she prepares to return to their apartment in New York's West Village, Carlisle grapples with lost relationships and old wounds. The narrative shifts between 2016 and Carlisle's adolescence during the start of the AIDS crisis, tracing the steps that led to her father's decision to cut her out of his life. Robert, James, and Carlisle's mother, Isabel, had all been involved in professional ballet. Teenager Carlisle hoped to follow them onto the stage, spending a pivotal summer studying ballet in New York City and living with James while her father managed a company upstate. Howrey's (The Wanderers, 2017) prose invites readers to feel the emotion of each dance, beautifully translating physical and visual art onto the page. While some plot elements resolve surprisingly smoothly, Howrey's incisive character studies create a heart-wrenching story of love and loss.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
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 jet�, 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.

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