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Summary: Victoria Redel - A terrific new talent
Review: A must read for every woman that is a mother. Beautifully written and thoroughly captivating.
Rating:
Summary: LOVERBOY
Review: An amazing, courageous and unique book indeed. Such gorgeous and beautiful writing and so deeply tragic a story. I had no idea what I was getting into when I got this book, and wow!!! If you are a mother, planning on being a mother or (male or female) love potent writing, I recommend this book to you. The risk of it will totally disrupt your day(s).
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Summary: Captivating Read
Review: From page one the reader is captivated. The story of a young woman obsessed with her young son is totally believable and bizarre at the same time. She creates an insular exciting and nurturing world for her son (a "duprass" as Kurt Vonnegut might call it) and repels all those who try to enter or interfere with that world. As her son grows older and wants to interact with the outside world, the mother becomes more possessive and possessed. A truly fascinating study.
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Summary: Hauntingly beautiful
Review: I came to this novel expecting the kind of howlers that made When the Road Bottoms Out a classic of ineptitude. But this is just a snoozy, by-the-numbers five-finger exercise in transgression. The chapters, though, are mercifully short.
Rating: 
Summary: Wake me when it's over
Review: I came to this novel expecting the kind of howlers that made When the Road Bottoms Out a classic of ineptitude. But this is just a snoozy, by-the-numbers five-finger exercise in transgression. The chapters, though, are mercifully short.
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Summary: Good Idea...................But That's About It
Review: I'm sorry, that's all I can think of. What begins as a great idea for a novel winds up being not even creepy in an interesting way. One can imagine this writer dreaming of Nabokov while putting this novel together, and unfortunately all of the ambitions of that idea are present here but none of the actual talent or payoff.
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Summary: Forgetable
Review: If you're a mother perhaps you'll like this. But does that mnake it great literature? I read this because a friend suggested it; what I didn't know though is that really its audience is meast only to be that tiny Oprah/Rosie crowd that only want to read books within their own tiny worldviews. I couldn't fit myself into this story, couldn't figure out why I should care. The writing at times is not only bad it's downright sloppy, so that didn't help either. I didn't like this book, sorry.
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Summary: Mother love run amok
Review: Loverboy creeps up on you even though you get plenty of warning that the narrator, mother of the year, is possibly a half a bubble off plumb. She's got a few hang ups. There's her problem with speaking in contractions. There's her tendency to kiss her son a little more than she ought to. She's got some serious separation issues and things start to escalate from there. You figure it just isn't gonna be one of those happily every after books. That said, it was haunting and beautifully written. As a mother with far less child lust than this poor woman, I could relate in "moments." Moments that sieze your heart and render you stupid. But uh, insanity is something else. Which is what makes the book so creepy, so enticing that I had to stay up until the wee hours to find out exactly how this would all play out. Not well, I was sure. I'll stick this one on the bookshelf next to Steve Martins' Shopgirl. Small but packs a good punch.
Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly beautiful
Review: 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.
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Summary: Stunning!
Review: Modern music composer Philip Glass used a word from the language of the Hopi Indians as the title of one of his most well-known works: KOYAANISQATSI, which means 'life out of balance'. His music was written as the soundtrack to a film filled with an incredible array of images illustrating this concept -- images of a world, a life, out of balance with nature and with itself. In LOVERBOY, Victoria Redel's amazing novel, we can see that concept borne out in the life of a mother whose concepts of love and motherhood are so twisted by her own experiences as a child that what should be one of a child's greatest blessings, a mother's love, is turned into pure obsession -- a smothering, stifling blanket.The woman -- whose name we never learn, we can only think of her as 'Paul's mother' -- has good intentions, and, I believe, does actually love her son very dearly. She herself was brought up as an only child by parents who were so in love with each other that their daughter could only feel excluded from their lives, even during 'family' activities. As she narrates her story, often returning to scenes and memories from her childhood, it's easy to feel the pain of loneliness and the 'cold' love of her parents, who very obviously had not the first clue about raising a child, about the lifelong effects their behavior would have on their offspring. There is a particularly poignant description by the narrator of walking with her parents -- Sybil and Marty, she calls them. Her father strides along the sidewalk, confident and sure of himself -- her mother walks beside him, turned toward him as she walks forward in the same direction, as if she is trying to be closer still. Their daughter trails along behind, feeling ignored to such an extent that she feels she must put on a show, affecting an exaggerated, palsic limp and a twisted facial grimace, so that passers-by will find their attention drawn to her, instead of the loving couple -- her parents -- who walk in front, oblivious to her performance. As Paul's -- 'Loverboy's' -- mother, she strives for as long as she can to keep him separate from other, 'lesser' children -- and he is, to be sure, an intelligent child, possessed of knowledge of many things of which his peers haven't a clue, thanks to his mother's attention to his 'education'. They frequent libraries and museums together, immersing themselves in books of all types -- no subject is off-limits, and his knowledge of things sometimes shocks and surprises others. He can recognize Bach's 'Brandenberg concerto', or a painting by Van Gogh or Degas -- things of which many adults are ignorant. The tension in the narrative increases dramatically as the mother has to work harder and harder to keep him from 'mingling with lesser children'. The onset of his school years fill her with unspeakable dread -- she feels trapped and desperate. As we read this story, we feel that something must inevitably 'give' -- we can feel it coming. Redel's language is shining and luminous. Even the 'rational insanity' (book jacket description) of Paul's mother is, in some ways, understandable -- we can feel empathy and compassion for her. We can feel the terror that exists within her at the thought of turning her child over to the care of others -- even for just the length of a school day. It is Paul's mother's extreme over-reaction to the upbringing she experienced at the hands of her parents that causes her to swing too far in the opposite direction. There are no indications in the story that she -- or Paul -- has suffered any sexual abuse, or physical maltreatment. The way she has chosen to live her life -- especially the narrative describing the process she chose to become pregnant when she decided she wanted a child -- shows us all too clearly that psychological abuse and neglect can be excruciatingly damaging, while never leaving a welt or a bruise as a tell-tale warning sign for outsiders. A very harrowing yet delicately composed and executed story -- moving and powerful, not one I will soon forget.
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