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.
Never in my life have I read something like Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin. I knew it would be dark and chilling, but I wasn’t expecting what I read. The book tells the story of Eva, who is writing a series of letters to her husband trying to recounting and trying to understand what happened to cause their son, Kevin into a sociopath. It’s no secret that Kevin killed nine of his classmates in a Columbine style attack (you find this out in the first 10 pages) but there is so much more to the story to keep you reading.
From the very start, you are going to hate Kevin – you’ll probably even hate Eva – their relationship is far from perfect and it is possible that this may scare you from wanting to have kids (definitely having kids like Kevin). There was nothing really wrong with Kevin’s childhood, he was given everything he could ever need; he was just stuck in suburban hell. The underlining theme of this book for me is the whole nature versus nurture debate. It could have been Eva’s ambivalence to Kevin and motherhood that affected him, or something else. I’m sure there is arguments about what caused Kevin to be the way he was; was he born with it, was it his parents, his home life, or something completely different.
For someone that never had kids, Lionel Shriver wrote rather well about motherhood and all the fears and worries that might come with the job. We Need to Talk about Kevin is very dark, so I don’t recommend it to everyone, but having said that, it is well worth the read if you think you can handle it. Apparently there is a movie adaptation of this coming soon, I don’t know how well that would work, I’m sure it will lose a lot of the feelings you get from the book.
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