Loverboy: A Novel - Softcover

Redel, Victoria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 015600724X ISBN 13: 9780156007245

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2002

Synopsis

In Victoria Redel's mesmerizing first novel, the question of what happens when a mother loves her child too much is deeply and darkly explored. Left with a small fortune by her parents and the cryptic advice, "it would do to find a passion," Redel's narrator sets out to become a mother--a task she feels she can be adequately passionate about. She conceives her son Paul through a loveless one-night stand, surrounds him with a wonderful, magical world for two--a world filled with books, music, endless games, and bottomless devotion--and calls him pet names like Birdie, Cookie, Puppy, and Loverboy. She wonders, "Has ever a mother loved a child more?" But as life outside their lace curtains begins to beckon the school-age Paul, his mother's efforts to keep him content in their small world become increasingly frantic and ultimately extreme by all definitions.
In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, exposing the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all types of devotion.

About this title

Review:

PRAISE FOR LOVERBOY

"A first novel that explores a mother's obsession, in prose at once lyrical and chillingly realistic."--Elle
"A spare and stunning debut whose lean, episodic style seems perfectly adapted to its subject matter . . . Perfect."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Cryptic . . . authoritative and vast-full of suspense, emotional urgency, and shimmering imagery."--The Village Voice

From the Back Cover:

loverboy
Winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize

"Loverboy is a fierce and harrowing book, a novel that precisely charts the course of a mother's love so steel-willed and relentless that we have no choice but come to understand the purely rational insanity Victoria Redel examines here. Ms. Redel is a writer whose stories and poems I have long admired, but Loverboy shows us all just how dynamic and beautiful and frightening her storytelling art truly is." Bret Lott

"Victoria Redel's contribution to the literature of obsession is rendered with unusual delicacy and daring." Amy Hempel

praise for Where the Road Bottoms Out

"Only a poet could have written this prose. Only a storyteller could keep a reader turning these pages so greedily." Grace Paley

"A true thing glitters, jewel-like, at the heart of these stories." Los Angeles Times

"Stories like memories, viewed through the thick and distortive lens of time, stories more sense than intellect, more instinct than erudition, come forth in this collection with language that is both sumptuous and spare." Ruminator Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 015600724X
• ISBN 13: 9780156007245
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224