A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, “My Heavenly Favorite” is the remarkable and chilling successor to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's international sensation, “The Discomfort of Evening”. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer's daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy's body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.
Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld's audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces full of pop lyrics, horror novels, the Favorite's fantasized conversations with Freud and Hitler, and her dreams of flight and destruction and transcendence.
An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, “My Heavenly Favorite” establishes Rijneveld as one of the most daring and brilliant writers on the world stage.
"Lucas Rijneveld's My Heavenly Favorite is a novel of exquisite discomfort and delicious poetry. Rijneveld writes with peerless moral courage and a sheer delight in the abject that we must each face in ourselves. This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp. I'm in awe."
Brandon Taylor
"The style is fevered . . . exploring many of the same themes that drove Rijneveld's first book: bucolic life, taboos, and abjection, among others."
Dilara O'Neil, Vulture's "23 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2024"
