Ask a Bookseller: 'They're Going to Love You'

It's one thing to enjoy a book; it's another to sell it to others. The book that Matt Nixon of A Cappella Books in Atlanta, Ga., has loved selling to his customers for the past few months has been Meg Howrey's novel “They're Going to Love You.”“It's just the most emotionally honest and well-observed [book], and when I was done with it, I wanted to hug it,” Nixon declares.The book follows Carlisle through two timelines, some 20 years apart. As a child, Carlisle lives with her mother, a former ballet dancer in the Balanchine Company, but she loves the few weeks a year she gets to spend with her father and his partner, James, in New York City.Carlisle dreams of being a ballerina, and she sees New York as a magical place of art and dance. The book vividly paints the 1980s arts scene just as the devastating AIDS crisis begins to take hold.Flash forward to the book's present, when Carlisle receives a call from James that her father is dying. The two have not spoken in nearly 20 years. The beating heart of the novel, Nixon says, is the betrayal that caused the father-daughter rift.“You really start to wonder: What is this betrayal? How could this possibly be that this wonderful relationship [could reach a point where] they no longer talk?” narrates Nixon. “It's one of those remarkable books where, you know, you're reading [and] you're reading, and then you realize what the betrayal is. And I literally gasped.”