This is one of the most stunning works of fiction I've read in a long time. Redel tells this story of obsessive maternal love with amazing artistry, bringing the reader intimately inside the experience of passion and madness. Her language is gorgeous, precise, her psychological depiction complex, believable and utterly intense. One can tell the author is also a poet and short story writer, by the tightness and focus of each phrase. Yet how fortunate for us that she has taken her talents to this forum in which she can so fully develop a character who will undoubtedly haunt this literary genre for generations to come. I'd recommend this to anyone with a love of language, or an interest in the ways of the mind and the heart.

Loverboy is one of the most beautiful, haunting, harrowing, and compelling novels I've read in a long, long time. What's uncanny -- and also terrifying -- is the way Redel makes the mother's obsessive, destructive, and obviously crazy love for her child accessible and approachable. We reject the mother's insanity even as we recognize the echoes of her passion in ourselves. The writing itself is stunning: sparse, clean, and direct, yet able to convey a feeling for scene, emotional nuance, and psychological complexity through its focus on minute details. This is a tour de force that I've recommended to mothers and non-mothers alike.

This a brilliant, subtle, haunting book. It's a story about mother love, but not the usual story. Pastel cottons and sentimentality are in short supply; in their place we are offered a psychologically nuanced portrait of devotion and adoration changing slowly, inexorably into obsession, convulsion, destruction. Beautifully written (it's not surprising that Victoria Redel is a poet), it seduces the reader into a world whose elements of nightmare become evident only too late. The main character -- a mother whose love of her child is the central passion in her life -- speaks lyrically and convincingly from the pages. Entering her world, we find ourselves spinning in a psychological landscape ever more grotesque. Except that the spinning is so gentle, so gradual, and the unfolding malignancy so subtly drawn, that we can't quite locate the moment when beloved dream becomes nightmare. It's a harrowing story. It is also -- in it's evocation of the intimacy of mother and child, and in it's close observations of the dailiness of parenting -- enchanting. Parents (at least those who tell themselves the truth) -- will find resonances and echos of themselves. But it's not just a book for mothers, or for parents. It's a book for anyone compelled by the complexities of desire, love, intimacy and responsibility. And it is a book for people delighted by fine writing.