Loverboy

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

Publishers Weekly

In Redel s controlled and convincing tale of a mother s obsession for her child, the first-person narrator endangers the life of her grade-school son, then asks rhetorically, "Has a mother ever loved a child more?" It is a disturbing question, since the entire novel proves to be the narrator s heartfelt demonstration of her single-minded devotion to the raising of her son, Paul. Beautifully succinct, lyrically composed chapters give occasionally disturbing glimpses of the narrator gravely ill in a hospital room, but not until the end of the novel does the reader become chillingly aware of how she has resisted the intrusion of the real world. Painting a convincing portrait of her complex and surprising sympathetic narrator, Redel (Where the Road Bottoms Out) makes it possible to empathize with the woman s overwhelming love for her son: the novel succeeds because the reader cannot condemn her.

Victoria Redel has published a book of short fiction, Where the Road Bottoms Out, as well as a prize-winning collection of poetry, Already the World. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College and in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York City.