My Heavenly Favorite

by Lucas Rijneveld
My Heavenly Favorite cover
Good Books rating 4.25
Literary Fiction
Technical:
  • ID: 450
  • Added: 2025-09-11
  • Updated: 2025-09-12
  • ISBN: 9781644452745
  • Publisher: Graywolf Press
  • Published: 2024-03-05
  • Reviews: 4

My Heavenly Favorite is a chilling and audacious novel by Booker International Prize winner Lucas Rijneveld. It follows a veterinarian who becomes obsessed with the farmer’s daughter, a girl longing for a boy’s body, set against the backdrop of a conservative Dutch countryside. Narrated from prison after the vet’s crimes, the novel blends a perverse reimagining of the Lolita story with surreal elements like pop lyrics, horror, and imagined conversations with Freud and Hitler, creating a paradoxically beautiful yet profane prose that grips the reader. The novel delves deeply into themes of abjection, taboo, and social norms, portraying a fractured psyche haunted by past traumas including death, suicide, and repression under Dutch Reform religion. It is a relentless exploration of forbidden desire and guilt, marked by hallucinatory language and a bleak worldview. My Heavenly Favorite establishes Rijneveld as a daring literary voice unafraid to confront the darkest aspects of human experience with linguistic ferocity and emotional intensity.

Reviews
Graywolf Press · 2024-03-05
powerful 4.50

The novel is a powerful, audacious exploration of taboo and grief, blending beauty and horror in its prose while confronting social norms through a disturbing Lolita-like narrative.

This review highlights the novel as an intense confession and lament that masterfully combines poetic prose with a chilling story of obsession and grief. The narrative, set in a conservative rural community, unflinchingly delves into difficult themes such as abjection and taboo, pushing readers into unsettling yet compelling spaces. The story’s power lies in its paradoxical beauty and moral courage, making it a remarkable successor to the author’s earlier work, noted for its discomforting talent. The reviewer emphasizes how the book refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a perverse glee, creating an experience that is both provocative and deeply affecting. The prose holds the reader firmly, making it impossible to look away despite the challenging subject matter. This combination of poetic language and dark themes makes the novel a standout work that challenges social norms and explores human frailty with stark honesty.

Quick quotes

    A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession.

    Rijneveld’s audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose.

    An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms.

World Literature Today · Elizabeth Fifer · 2024-03-01
harrowing 4.00

The novel offers a harrowing and complex portrayal of a troubled veterinarian’s obsessive love and internal torment, highlighting themes of guilt, repression, and the inability to escape past trauma.

Elizabeth Fifer’s review presents the novel as a dark descent into forbidden territory, tracing the psychological unraveling of a farm veterinarian obsessed with a young girl. The story is set against a backdrop of death, religious repression, and personal guilt, with vivid imagery of loss and haunting memories that deepen the protagonist’s torment. The vet’s struggle with his identity and desires is portrayed with a painful realism, showing how he is trapped between a painful youth and a rejected adulthood. The review notes how the vet’s magical thinking and fantasies reveal his desperate attempts to escape his reality, yet he remains unable to grow or find peace. The narrative explores the collision of personal and historical trauma, with the protagonist’s guilt permeating his perspective. Fifer’s interpretation underscores the book’s emotional intensity and the complexity of its characters, making it a challenging but compelling read.

Quick quotes

    He feels caught in the netherworld of an aging pederast, without the ability to advance.

    Only in fantasy can he shed his gross materiality.

    He will never be a boy again but refuses to recognize or accept his adulthood.

4Columns · Megan Milks · 2024-03-01
intense 4.25

The novel is a hallucinatory and brutal confession of abuse and obsession, showcasing Rijneveld’s linguistic prowess while confronting unsettling subject matter with intensity and complexity.

Megan Milks describes the book as a tortured, delirious love letter from a deeply troubled narrator, revealing the disturbing nature of his obsession with a young girl. The story unfolds as a confession from prison, blending fevered emotion with a complex narrative that exposes the shape and scope of the narrator’s predation. The novel is marked by its breathless, vertiginous prose that mirrors the narrator’s desires and mental state, making it as much a linguistic feat as a harrowing portrayal of abuse. Milks emphasizes how the novel is brutal to read but also a wonder of art, where the author’s ferocious command of language drives the intensity and emotional depth of the story. The review points to the novel’s relentless exploration of difficult themes without flinching, making it a challenging but important work that demands attention and reflection.

Quick quotes

    A delirious, deranged account that is sort of confession, not quite apology.

    Surging forth with pages-long sentences that swell and contract to the rhythm of the narrator’s desires.

    My Heavenly Favorite is as much a display of Rijneveld’s ferocious linguistic prowess as it is an unflinching portrayal of abuse.

The New Indian Express · 2024-02-17
disturbing 4.25

The novel explores the complex and disturbing relationship between an abuser and his teenage victim, blurring lines between crime and desire without demonizing the perpetrator.

This review highlights how the novel powerfully portrays a deeply unsettling dynamic between the aging veterinarian and the fourteen-year-old girl. The story is layered with the girl's struggle with identity and desire, set against a backdrop of grief and rural hardship, making the narrative both disturbing and compelling. The reviewer notes the intense emotional and psychological depth, emphasizing the portrayal of powerlessness and the complexity of the characters' interactions without straightforward moral judgment. The unfolding of the story reveals a gradual stripping away of illusions, showing the raw and painful realities behind the characters' experiences. The review also points out the novel's continuation of themes from Rijneveld’s previous work, underlining a persistent exploration of trauma and loss. The girl's longing for transformation and escape, juxtaposed with the veterinarian's unsettling obsession, creates a narrative that is both haunting and thought-provoking. This nuanced depiction invites readers to grapple with difficult questions about desire, innocence, and culpability.

Quick quotes

    A powerfully written novel by the Booker-winning author that blurs the line between crime and desire without demonising the perpetrator.

    The sense of deception is striking and blows bit by bit as the story unfolds.

    The urge to have herself sliced in half comes so strong to the girl that she lies on the metal bed and jabs the scalpel in her thighs.

Appears in Lists