SOURCE: A review of Mother's Boys, Vol. 7, No. 313, July 29, 1994, p. 37.

In the following laudatory review, Cooke praises Mother's Boys as “an impressive achievement.”

Margaret Forster's fully fleshed-out, dramatic and absorbing Mother's Boys shows a novelist writing at the top of her form. Her subject is dark enough: the unprovoked violence and degradation visited upon a 15-year-old boy, Joe, by two teenagers who select their target quite at random. Leo confesses to having taken LSD before the assault; his accomplice, Gary, a sadist pure and simple, is tracked down by the police some time after the incident.

Their victim is portrayed in agonising close-up, slowly recovering from a degree of humiliation that he is reluctant to disclose to anyone but his mother. And here is the crux of this story about maternal guilt and male vulnerability and in-turned anger. A shared neurosis torments Harriet and Joe, mother and son...