Katie Kadue at Bookforum:
LO. LEE. TA. This is the trip the tip of the tongue expects to take when reading a novel from the point of view of a man currently incarcerated following the rape of a teenage girl he’s groomed. And at the tender age of thirteen pages into Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite, an attentive reader may indeed murmur “Lolita!” when the unnamed narrator, a former farm veterinarian from the Dutch countryside, refers to the titular “favorite,” also unnamed, as “the fire of my loins.” So far, so Lo.
Initial press for the novel, originally written in Dutch and translated by Michele Hutchison, has fed the frenzy of Lolitapalooza. It’s been called “a modern Lolita,” “a novel that wears its debt to Lolita . . . pinned on its chest with abject pride,” “a queer and profane take on the Lolita archetype,” “Lolita-esque,” “a cowshit-splashed Lolita.” Someone who picks up a copy and skims the blurbs might wonder if we really need another male-authored Lolita from the first-person perspective of the pedophile, no matter how spruced up with shit, no matter how daringly different.
more here.