For Carlisle Martin, a dance-obsessed girl growing up with her mother in Ohio, an annual fortnight with her father and his boyfriend in their Greenwich Village home exuded impossible glamour. Stepping through Robert and James’s front door was her “favourite entrance to perform”, and life within – full of art, beauty and flatteringly age-inappropriate conversation – felt like a ballet. Then, one summer in her early 20s, Carlisle found herself banished from their world.
She hasn’t seen either man in almost two decades, and has made her own way as a choreographer, when James calls to summon her to her father’s deathbed. The cause of their estrangement is the driving mystery in They’re Going to Love You, Meg Howrey’s fourth novel, a luminous chronicle of betrayal, sacrifice and creative ambition, framed by New York’s Aids crisis in the 1980s and some seriously complex family dynamics.
This is by no means a flawless novel. It takes a while to warm up, falling back on therapy speak as Carlisle inspects her guilt and shame surrounding the events of that distant summer when she was exiled from her father’s home, as well as her ambivalence towards her mother, whom she’s always resented for being so easy to push away. A significant love affair, while packing plenty of heat, doesn’t wholly convince.
Yet throughout, Howrey, herself a former professional dancer, finds fresh and compelling ways to capture the discipline at her book’s heart, noticing how, for instance, dancing en pointe “weaponises” ballet for adolescent girls. And as the movement and music build to an emotional climax, she makes room for stillness and silence to startling effect.
The fairy tale element looms unavoidably large in the balletic canon, but Carlisle’s happily ever after is an elegant riposte to its more sexist elements, for here is a complicated, candid heroine who has no need of a co-star; who can hold the stage all on her own. By the book’s close, readers will be clamouring for an extra curtain call.
• They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
