Wednesday, December 07, 2022

2022 book 215

 Meg Howrey's They’re Going to Love You

I LOVED all of Howrey's previous novels, but this one I kept picking up, reading the first paragraph, thinking “I’m not in the mood for this,” and reading something else instead. This time I finally plowed ahead but it did take me a bit to get into. It’s about a woman, a ballet dancer turned choreographer, whose parents were both dancers, but then her father fell in love with a man and her parents divorced, and her mother moved her to Ohio, and so trips to visit her father and his boyfriend in New York were rare and glamorous, but she and her father have been estranged for almost twenty years because of a Betrayal, but now his husband has called her because her father is dying and she has to return to New York to say goodbye. Parts of this worked really well for me—the childhood visits in the 80s during the AIDS crisis particularly—but I didn’t always enjoy the narrative voice and the betrayal doesn’t turn out to be very interesting. I did also enjoy the portrait of a woman creative in a male-dominated field, and her joy in her work. Beautiful ending, but not my favorite by this author. A-/B+.

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