Loverboy - Hardcover

Redel, Victoria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555973221 ISBN 13: 9781555973223

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2001

Synopsis

What happens if a mother loves her child too much?

Sybil and Marty, indifferent to their daughter in life, left her a small fortune and the cryptic advice, "It would do well to find a passion." In Victoria Redel's utterly mesmerizing new novel, we listen to the voice of this daughter as she willfully sets out to become a mother-- who is nothing if not passionate.

She has named her son Paul, but calls him "Birdie," "Cookie," "Puppy," "Loverboy," as she creates a wonderful, magical world for two, a world filled with books, music, endless games, and bottomless devotion. "Has ever a mother loved a child more?" she wonders as they play spy on the strangers from behind their heavy, lace curtains. But as life outside begins to beckon to the boy, the mother's efforts to keep their small world confined become increasingly frantic and ultimately tragic.

In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, and yet through her we see the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all devotion. After all, "Who has ever wanted to share a love?"

About this title

Review:

"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

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: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1555973221
• ISBN 13: 9781555973223
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208