Item: We Need to Talk about Kevin
Rating: 5.00
Author: ibeforem

by Lionel Shriver

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE read more Interactive online message board now live - visit here Reading group questions here (but don?t spoil the plot!) Read an extract --------------------- Two years ago, Eva Khatchadourian?s son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. Telling the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault? Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy - the tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.

I really wasn’t expecting much when I picked up this book for $4 at the book fair. Man, was I wrong. This book was extremely captivating. At first, I was concerned that the narrator’s language was way too flowery and extravagant, but once you got to know her a little, you realized that it fit, exactly. And despite these letters being written after Thursday, information is handed out in tantalizing little nuggets, and you don’t know the full story until nearly the very end. I’m still internally debating the believability of the child’s behavior, but nothing should surprise me when it comes to people.

I would recommend this book to anyone... the publisher’s description doesn’t do it credit.

We Need to Talk about Kevin (Serpent's Tail Classics)

by Lionel Shriver

Reviewed by ibeforem on Dec 31, 2005

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