We Need to Talk About Kevin

"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a disquieting, provocative, and brilliantly written novel about a mother, desperately attempting to understand why her son, 15-year-old Kevin, brutally, with premeditation, murdered seven of his fellow classmates, a cafeteria worker and his English teacher in a Columbine-style school massacre. There have been nationwide discussions on the cause of events like these - especially during the 1990s when it seemed like school shootings ran rampant throughout the US. In Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, Littleton, seemingly normal kids, kids who had almost everything a child could want, became terribly derailed. Some argue that the proliferation of and easy access to guns is the cause; others that the excess of violence in movies, TV programs and video games induce violent behavior in children and adolescents. The one question almost everyone seems to have in common is, "What were these murderous kids' parents like?" "Didn't they recognize symptoms of violence in their own children?"

Eva Khatchadourian, Kevin's bereft mother, narrates this novel through a series of compelling letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. She examines her son's life, from conception to his terrible act of violence, trying to understand the why of it. What becomes clear early on is that Eva tortures herself with blame. She is guilt-ridden that her shortcomings as a parent might have caused Kevin's evil act, his violent behavior, his very nature. She must have failed, she must have been deficient as a mother, for her boy to commit such a chilling crime. She also considers that neither nature nor nurture are solely responsible for shaping a child's character. Her honest, introspective correspondence to her beloved husband causes the reader to consider that some children just might be born bad. How and when are psychopaths created? The reader is pulled back and forth between empathy and blame, anger and grief, and perhaps, ultimately to forgiveness.

Through Eva's perspective we watch a story unfold. A happy, almost idyllic marriage to Franklin; a brilliant career in a business which she, herself, created; her ambivalent feelings when she became pregnant, an event which interfered with her career; the indifference she felt when she held her son for the first time; Kevin's difficult infancy - he refused his mother's milk and didn't like to be held by her; his total manipulation of his father, who believed Kevin could do no wrong, putting a permanent strain on the marriage; Kevin's lack of empathy and cruel streak, which he blatantly flaunted in front of his mother and hid from his Dad; and Eva's fear that her dislike for her son, which she went overboard to conceal, would damage him - further escalating his already violent nature.

"We Need To Talk About Kevin" examines how a heinous event can impact a town, a marriage, a family and an individual. It also causes the reader to reflect on the concept of unconditional love. Lionel Shriver's clear, crisply crafted prose builds tension throughout her novel, ultimately leading to a stunning conclusion. Her narrative is almost perfectly paced. This is an extraordinary psychological study that gripped me, riveted me, from the first page to the last. And the author ably portrays the complexity and the horror of the act and the consequences. I was seriously left breathless and horribly saddened after finishing the book. This is most definitely not an "up" novel or a light read. However, it may be my favorite book of 2004 and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I have purchased 2 more of Ms. Shriver's novels as a result of reading this one.
JANA

This is one of the most chilling and compulsively readable books Ive opened in a long time. As you read Eva Khatchadourians letters to her estranged husband you think this is what it must be like for parents whose child has just murdered classmates and a popular teacher.

As Eva reveals in her letters, she knew something was wrong with Kevin from the moment of his birth when he turned away from her breast snarling and screaming. The anger does not wane, even though outwardly he was a passive, disinterested child. She blames her own mixed feelings toward him, but her beloved husband Franklin fiercely defends the boy whenever she asks why babysitters never come back for a second time and other families go great lengths to keep Kevin away from their own children. And Eva doesnt like him. No matter how hard she tries--and she does try very hard, moving to the suburbs, staying home, none of which she wants to doshe does not like her son.

Since you know from the beginning that Kevin is in juvenile prison for killing his classmates, you might think that the suspense in the story will come from finding out how he planned his spree and carried it out. You would be very, very mistaken. Very late in We Need to Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver introduces a twist that is completely unexpected and totally shocking. These are words too frequently used in describing thrillers which rarely deliver the unexpected or the shocking. Believe me, in this book, those words do not begin to describe the wallop Shriver packs in the last quarter of the novel.

I was unfamiliar with Lionel Shriver, and will (after a recovery period) look for her other novels. She digs fearlessly into the back of her characters minds and the bottoms of their hearts. Read this book.

Shriver's brilliant novel explores the depth of a couple's journey into parenthood through letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her husband. Such a limited form could prove tiresome in lesser hands, but Shriver excells by giving life to Eva in uncompromisingly full dimension, revealing her faults and virtues in full measure.
While the themes of reluctant motherhood and high school mass murder and their possible relationship are central to the plot and handled masterfully, the author has a rare gift of understanding of the inner self that literally puts the reader inside Eva's mind.
This level of insight extends to illuminate the dark side in the person of Eva's son Kevin while at the same time offering no easy explanation of what may have contributed decisively to the creation of his utterly evil persona.
There are many layers in Shriver's writing and each sentence is packed tightly with content and resonant truth. So compelling are the moment to moment revelations that one is temporarily suspended from the story. But when things really heat up in the last third of the book it becomes impossible to put it down.
One of the finest writers I've come across.

Between the dark and the daylight,
When night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the children's hour.

A whisper and then a silence,
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Children's Hour"

School shooters were the menace of the late `90s, holding adults in their sweaty little grip for nearly a decade. In 1996, a teacher and two students were killed in Moses Lake, Washington. In 1997, a thirteen-year-old student shot a classmate over $40. That same year, Evan Ramsey killed a student and the principal of his school in Bethel, Alaska; Luke Woodham killed three classmates, wounded seven, and stabbed his mother to death in Pearl, Mississippi; and 14-year-old Michael Carneal shot up a Paducah, Kentucky school prayer group, killing three.

In 1998, the juvenile shooters became more brazen. That spring, a 13-year-old partnered with an 11-year-old in Jonesboro, Arkansas to kill five and wound ten. A month later, Andrew Wurst killed a teacher in Edinboro, Pennsylvania and, in Springfield, Oregon, Kip Kinkel upped the ante by murdering his parents as well. The epidemic seemed to culminate in 1999, when 12 were killed and 24 injured at Columbine High School in suburban Denver.

The counter-epidemic was no less predictable and no less morosely enthralling as the country scrambled frantically to understand why. In the wake of the Columbine murders, the victims' families filed lawsuits against the police, the school district, AOL Time Warner, Palm Pictures, Sony Entertainment, and the parents of the perpetrators.

Blame for the murders was widely scattered and carelessly aimed. Video games, movies, rock music, godlessness, gun control, and working mothers were all discarded before cliques and adolescent bullying were uneasily adopted to explain this spate of children spinning violently out of control.

In 2003 (still two years before 16-year-old Jeffrey Weise would kill seven people in Red Lake, Minnesota), Lionel Shriver tackled the question fictitiously in We Need to Talk About Kevin (Perseus Books). In a series of letters to her husband, Eva Khatchadourian sorts through her son's childhood and her own reluctance about motherhood in an effort to understand what drove Kevin to murder nine of his classmates on the eve of his 16th birthday.

Granted, the epistolary artifice is forced and Shriver (who proudly describes herself as a pedant) is a verbal show-off, telling the story in languorous, unnecessarily complex sentences. But Kevin is still a brilliant tragicomic satire of child-centered families in the `90s, raising the possibility that we're allowing these little beasts to run wild in the name of building their "self-esteem."

Eva is a casualty of child-centeredness. She reluctantly scales back her career in publishing travel guides to have a child she isn't sure she wants and, from birth, she ascribes malicious intent and intractable motives to Kevin's behavior. She's impatient, sharp-tongued, and has little use for the mawkishly sentimental notions of ideal maternity.

Shriver obviously expects us to ask whether Kevin's problems are all his mother's fault and we can never quite ascertain Eva's credibility. She admits she was a terrible mother, but even this conclusion is suspect as she inflates the mother-son relationship to unreasonable proportions (which she acknowledges as a form of vanity).

But it's hard to avoid the possibility that child-centeredness has as much to do with Kevin's murderous tendencies as Eva's chilly reception of motherhood. At its core is the belief that children, due to an assumed psychological fragility, are utterly shaped by their parents and therefore "good parenting" means the mother must subsume her entire identity in her children. What's more, she must enjoy every moment of this for, if she does not, the child will sense her ambivalence and be warped by it.

One earmark of child-centeredness is over-indulgence and lack of discipline. If children do something bad, it's assumed to be the fault of the parents (primarily the mother and usually because she is, in some way, selfishly indulging herself).

Another related earmark is a preoccupation with the child's psyche and self-image. The theory goes that, because children are entirely shaped by their parents, they are assumed to be a tabula rasa and intrinsically good. Anything the mother does (particularly any selfish desires or less-than-enthusiastic attitudes) can mar this perfect slate, resulting in bad behavior and mental illness.

There's an historical myopia to these steep and immutable maternal expectations. They fail to acknowledge that parenting and childhood are culturally-defined and that beliefs about child-rearing change drastically across time and place. To even come close to meeting child-centered expectations requires a certain amount of wealth and leisure. Before modern conveniences made this possible, no parent would have had the time or disposable wealth to focus this much energy on parenting as a task in itself -- there was too much farming, weaving, hunting, ranching, and domestic labor to be done. Yet somehow society managed to progress anyhow.

Nonetheless, most readers will cheerfully collaborate in blaming Eva and few blame Kevin's father, Franklin, who sees only good in his son and undermines any attempt to discipline him, placing a wedge of marital discord between the parents. Kevin is coddled and over-indulged by a father who becomes so invested in the kind of son he wants that he fails to see the son he actually has. Kevin can get away with anything and has no respect for Franklin from the beginning.

That readers sympathize so readily with Franklin underscores the expectation that mothers will give everything while fathers will get a free pass no matter how inept or uninvolved they may be. Can a failure to discipline truly be considered superior parenting to a failure to indulge? Even if we accept that Kevin was born a tabula rasa and would have been ok if he'd been born to different parents, wouldn't a failure to see his flaws have been at least as influential as Eva's reluctance to have him in the first place?

There is arguably the strongest textual evidence that Kevin has an organic mental illness and has been a sociopath from birth. And, on this score, Shriver has obviously done her homework. He presents a lot of the vague sort of symptoms that correlate with sociopathy, but which can't be taken as conclusive proof of it: constant crying in infancy, an unusually large head and lack of muscle tone (as a child, pediatricians describe Kevin as "floppy"), an unusual acceptance of boredom, a tendency to "zone out" (eyes glazed over and mouth hanging open), extreme difficulty with toilet training, and an alarming lack of empathy.

It's hard to read this book and not give in to the temptation to settle on one or two particular answers. But part of the tragedy of the Kevins of the world is that they have no meaning. There's no way to make them safe and pocket-sized and controllable without being, to some degree, dishonest about them.

What drove Kevin off the deep end may be the most obvious question posed by the novel, but it's also the most banal, ultimately resolved only through a leap of blind reader hubris. We close the book with no more certainty about what causes school shootings than when we picked it up - and author interviews suggest this was probably the point. We grapple for The Answer out of the same vanity exhibited by Eva - the need of the privileged to find order in the universe and use that order to ward off disaster. If there is no definitive answer, then any parent is capable of producing a monster.

Besides, there are much more interesting questions posed by Shriver's keen insights into American culture and our nihilistic little hearts.

Kevin sees a kindred spirit in his mother because Eva is able to peek into the same black void of meaninglessness that makes Kevin's life so intolerable, but which everyone else around them ignores. Kevin looks to Eva to guide him through this Nietzschean Hell that he holds in such contempt. And herein lies Eva's failure - much greater than not being nice and feminine and maternal: she was never able to give Kevin's life meaning for him.

If we accept at face value that Eva's problem is a failure to be instinctively maternal, we risk ignoring her much greater character flaws that would have been no less flaws had she never decided to reproduce. If anyone around Kevin could have convinced him that life has meaning, it would probably have been Eva. She's the only one who would have given him an answer that wasn't coated in dishonesty and foolishness. Instead, she tells him that the cure to existential boredom is to "bring a book."

Eva and Franklin wanted a child in order to answer what they called the "Big Question" - the purpose of human existence - which Eva later realizes may be the most selfish part of their reasoning. They can't give Kevin's life any meaning because they had kids as a way to give their own lives meaning.

It's a question that's never before been raised in the whole course of human history. Children used to be essential because they were needed for labor. Now that the First World no longer needs children economically, it's become a viable question: Do I want children and, if so, why?

It's a question that's needled American readers and given Lionel Shriver the reputation of an ice queen. Shriver (who changed her name from "Margaret Ann" to "Lionel" at age 15) is an American expatriate living in London whose mixed feelings about the United States may shine through in Eva even more than her contempt for the soppiness and boredom of motherhood. And she indulges these fierce American insights even with her characters.

Franklin, a hot dog-snarfing Republican patriot, is both the stereotypical American and the way we want to see ourselves. He embodies our national story and the way we cling, in the face of all evidence, to the insistence that the whole rest of the world sees us the same way we see ourselves -- reality need not apply. In many ways, Franklin is a better person than anyone else in the novel, but his complete refusal to acknowledge reality is his undoing.

Eva, the daughter of Armenian immigrants, is also a sort of American cliche, but one that the Franklins like to minimize. She's the gadfly. She's the stereotypical East Coast liberal who idealizes Europe and Canada and rolls her eyes at all those ignorant rubes she's stuck sharing a country with. She believes she's smarter than they are and, though she's right, she's not a better person for it. Her honesty is unacceptable to the Franklins because it pierces the national story of American superiority and, ironically, it's her own honesty that makes her miserable. It enables her to not only see everything that unfolds for what it is, but to realize her own hand in making it that way. At least Franklin's ignorance is bliss.

Kevin is the dark side of American culture that nobody wants to talk about. Our meaninglessness. Our boredom. Our dissatisfaction with consumerism. We have everything, so what's left to take pleasure in except hedonistic sadism and destruction? Kevin is really the logical outcome of combining the Franklins and the Evas.

Even little Celia -- Kevin's small, timid, and self-effacing sister -- has a symbolic role to play. She's our other unmentionable dark side. Our fear and our sense of isolation. She's the reality that, for all America's international bravado, we're really so petrified of The Terrorists that we're quivering under the bed, peeing ourselves. And it's too bad she's unmentionable, because she's also our un-self-conscious innocence, our artless naivete, our incorruptible sweetness.

For all Shriver's evident frustrations with child-centeredness ("the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake [are] the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade"), with therapy culture ("a complaint common enough to have a name...dangles options like Internet chat rooms and community support groups for rhapsodic communal bellyaching"), with cheap forgiveness ("conspicuous clemency has become the religious version of driving a flashy car"), or with exceptionalism ("Americans are...self-righteous and superior about their precious democracy, and condescending toward other nationalities because they think they've got it right - never mind that half the adult population doesn't vote...Worst of all, they have no idea that the rest of the world can't stand them."), what really seems to stick in her craw is the American love of spectacle. As Christopher Hitchens (whom I'm loath to quote, but in this instance, he's right) once said, "All Americans really want, deep down, is to be special."

So, was Kevin then responding to a dysfunctional society obsessed with fame by any means necessary? For a short season, school shootings were a fad. They went from the distant, unrealistic fantasies of misfit kids to a quasi-legitimate form of adolescent self-expression. Adults fed the fad by speaking in darkly hopeful tones about how it could happen in their town too. It got a lot of attention and kids always do things that garner lots of adult attention. It didn't take kids long to figure out that shooting up their school would make them famous all over the country.

Shriver shrinks not from polemic when she has Kevin deliver the following speech to the TV cameras: "You wake up and you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening...You watch TV all night or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching...What are they watching?...People like me...you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot." [Italics original]

Perhaps it's poor form for an author to shame her readers in this way, but it's certainly effective. We know going into it that Kevin shoots up his school and I was, true to form, gobbling the book up in anticipation of a gory climax. Just the same way millions of people sat glued to the television on the day of the Columbine murders.

Our insatiable appetite for disaster porn may serve the higher purpose of giving us someone to loathe. Andrea Yates was once everyone's favorite mother to hate. We needed her so we could say, "Hey, I may not be perfect, but at least I'd never drown my five children in the bathtub." Thereby drawing a clear, reassuring line between good mothers and bad mothers. Yates externalized what is perhaps a common reluctance about having kids and a fear of snapping at some point and hurting them. Maybe so many people wanted to kill Andrea Yates in order to kill the part of themselves that feared they could identify with her.

Shriver herself provokes nearly as strong a reaction as Eva, apparently for the unfeminine crime of saying and doing whatever she pleases. Shriver's cheerful admission that she finds children messy, loud, tiresome, and "brutally dull" has earned her a reputation as "anti-child," implying that any woman who doesn't enjoy children is abnormal and suspicious. She openly disdains American tackiness and spends as much time overseas as possible. When she won the Orange Prize for Kevin in 2005, she was criticized for not displaying the proper humility. The BBC ran a photo of her jubilantly kissing her award and she admitted that she not only very much wanted to win, but believed that she deserved to win.

It's this desire for iconoclasm that proves Eva - and her creator - to be ironically and ineluctably, even lovably, as American as apple pie.

This book had my rapt attention for a weekend. I could not stop reading. While seeming a bit pretentious at first, the prose is consistent, sometimes beautiful, and definitely a part of the person we come to know as Eva Katchadourian. Once I became used to her style, it did not bother me; I understood it was Eva, not Lionel Shriver.

The characterization in this novel is excellent, particularly that of Eva. She is possibly the most complete character I've ever read. I was annoyed at her at times, and even bewildered at her reactions to certain situations. However, I always found Eva to be a sympathetic character. She makes many mistakes (and so did Franklin, her husband...he sometimes exhasperated me so much I wanted to throw the book!), which she admits to. Eva villifies Kevin when he is just an infant, which forms an ever-growing wedge between herself and Franklin. At the same time, it seems that she did what most normal, flawed people would do in her situation. Her letters let us know how much she loves Franklin still, despite the way he seemed to turn against her sometimes due to their disagreements about Kevin (Franklin never really accepts that Kevin could be the sociopath Eva suspects him to be).

Eva's story is disturbing, harrowing, and gripping. It is hard to forget...it does not just go away when you put the book down. This book affected me in a way that no book has before. It made me question whether I ever want to have a child. It gave me a nightmare. It even made me feel trepidatious about going back to the schools (I am a substitute teacher). It even, as another reviewer put it, "left a dent in my heart." I am glad to have experienced such a well-written, moving story, but at the same time, this story left me with a sense of sadness, melancholy, and anxiety that I suspect will have a grip on me for a few days. Do not pick this up for light reading. If you want to become absorbed in a story that is important, timely, provocative, and emotionally gripping, please give this book a chance.

Kevin is one of a recent series of "Columbine" books--those that try and plumb the characters of young boys who plan high school massacres. Some are just bad (Vernon God Little), others are great (Project X). Kevin falls in the middle.
Its major strength is the compelling nature of the premise--just what is it that caused young Kevin (in prison at the time of the novel's present) to kill several of his classmates and some school staff? It's the sort of question we all know there is no real answer for, and yet we feel the need to ask it anyway. Both the question and the need to ask it are examined through the course of the narration--structured as a series of letters from Eva, Kevin's mother, to her estranged husband and Kevin's father, Franklin.
While the structure allows for a lot of introspection and detail, it also feels a bit gimmicky in places. On the one hand, it's seems self-evidently clumsy when she spends so much time telling Franklin things he already knows, having lived through those same scenes. On the other hand, that self-evident clumsiness eventually too obviously hints at what is supposed to be, as Publisher Weekly puts it, "a huge and crushing shock." Without giving much away, I'll say it didn't seem all that shocking by the time it happened and somewhat worsened the contrived feel of the structure.
The other negative aspect of Shriver's choice of structure is that it locks us into a single voice, that of the mother, and over the book's 300+ pages, that voice starts to wear on the reader. Actually, it began to wear on this reader pretty early and Eva's voice was one of the major stumbling blocks to continuing the book. She is not a likable character through much of it and though I give Shriver credit for taking such a risk, Eva is also at times not a particularly interesting person which makes reading her for pages and pages tough to do at times. Worse than uninteresting or unlikable, she can be downright annoying (whiny, self-interested, self-deluded, passive, unbelievable) which makes it even harder to follow her for so long.
Character in general is a flaw in the book. While Eva is tough to swallow at times, there are enough times of sharp insight (into people or society in general), of incisive humor, of complexity (a woman truly torn over motherhood) that one can sort of ride those moments over the rougher sections. The other characters, unfortunately, almost never offer such redeeming moments. The father, Franklin, is mostly a dolt, almost a caricature of one, and is simply too hard to believe. There is denial, there is delusion, there is a reader's suspension of disbelief, and there is "I just don't buy a real person would be this dumb this often". Franklin falls into the last category. The sister, Celia, is far too shallow, far too docile, too clearly Kevin's opposite, and therefore comes across as more plot contrivance than character. And what happens with her ratchets up the suspension of disbelief to the stretching point and then beyond. Other characters are barely felt, though even some of these are hard to believe (especially in a plot involving a school teacher and district board).
The plot, as mentioned above, does have some major flaws of believability, especially as Kevin ages and his behavior becomes more serious. The book's strengths I think lie more in the pre-Kevin descriptions of Eva's honest ambivalence over motherhood and in Kevin's early, pre-vocal years. After that his precociousness becomes more difficult to believe, as does his parents' passive response to his behavior and language. His father is portrayed as more dumb and deluded and other adults as more clueless. And there's simply too much plot. One of the reasons Project X is so good is that Shepard knew to keep it tight. There is at times in Kevin agonizingly unnecessary detail. And so much time detailing Kevin's behavior only makes it all the more unbelievable that nobody does anything about it.
As mentioned before, the big "surprise" at the end wasn't really all that surprising. The murders itself, when finally shown, are somewhat anti-climatic, partly because it's so hard to believe Kevin's set-up actually worked and partly because not only have we spent almost 400 pages aimed at them and being exposed to lots of smaller but similarly evil acts from Kevin, but also because we've also been given in some detail many of the well-publicized actual killings such as Columbine etc. But if the big shocker and the murder scene aren't all that successful, the ending is. One just wishes it would have come sooner and cleaner. There's are some real gems in We Need to Talk about Kevin, but they would shine a lot more clearly and powerfully if the book had been cut by at least a third and if a few of the side characters had been more fully dimensional. It's an interesting read, at times a compelling one, but also a slow and eventually disappointing one. It's much, much better than Vernon God Little, nowhere near as spot-on or compelling as Project X. Slightly recommended for its good parts and its close, with forewarning that it has a lot of flaws, any one of which might make you put the book down well before the end.

Even after reading this novel twice I am unsure as to who is in the right or wrong: Kevin or Eva.

As someone who has no interest in having children, I felt a great deal of sympathy for Eva. How does one raise a child when that elusive mothering gene refuses to kick in? But perhaps the problem isn't Eva, who does show deep maternal love towards her daughter, but instead is Kevin. Are some children born unlovable?

The plot is important, of course, but to dwell too long on the particulars robs the reader of the delightful unfolding of complexity that elicts both intellectual and emotional responses. Let me instead comment on the writing.

This book is not for those who would rather read Nicholas Sparks or Danielle Steel. This book expects its readers to know language, revel in language. Lionel does not write "down" to the readers; on the contrary, she expects that a reader is versed in language and grammar and expects a book to be not only entertaining but well written. What a delight that is!

The best part of this mastery of language comes the recognition that perhaps it's not the author's own use of language but Eva's instead - a highly intelligent, literary, capable woman who refuses to be obsequious to slavish convention. Her voice propels the book and her voice is one of superiority marred by the realization that her life is overshadowed by her son, a son she was reluctant to create in the first place, yet now commands her life in all respects.

I cannot recommend this book more - I think it offers not only a great story, but a wonderful trip through the structure of language, to me its greatest selling point.

I picked up "We Need to Talk About Kevin" because of the subject matter. Not because it was about a killing spree at a high school, but because it was told from the viewpoint of the mother of the boy who killed his classmates and a teacher. It puts a twist on the "common" Columbine-like story.

The novel begins after the melee, as the mother, Eva, traces the history of her son Kevin back through his days as an infant, through all his apathy and wicked stunts growing up. She tells Kevin's story in long letters written every other week or so to her estranged husband. At first, this seemed like the actions of a crazy woman trying to re-establish her marriage. But who on Earth would ever want to reconcile with a nagging, pretentious woman who uses long diatribes with $10 words to fault you throughout your marriage?

Not until halfway through the novel was my interest fully grabbed and I didn't tire of reading another whiny letter from Eva. Up until that point, Eva comes off as a pompous woman with whom I really couldn't relate...and really didn't want to. You later realize, though, that this perspective is probably the way Kevin viewed her and why he held such resentment for his mother.

The story itself is a good example of the old Nature vs. Nurture debate. Are people inherently born evil? Or is it based on the way they're raised? Although this novel doesn't answer the question, it gives credence to both arguments and can make for an interesting discussion.

The ending of the novel is very dramatic and offers an interesting manipulation in events, which I appreciated. At that point, I was absorbed into the characters' lives and actually wanted more. I felt like a part of their "dysfunctional" family. The characters felt real, with the exception of Franklin, Kevin's father, who resembled the "golly gee" Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch (the movie version, not the TV one). It's hard to believe that Eva would ever marry such a na

I cadged an advance reader's copy of this novel and read it in two sittings. It's terrific--a tour de force that constitutes, to my knowledge, the first full literary treatment of the American teenage mass-murder phenomenon that culminated in the Columbine massacre in 1999. Shriver's effort will be difficult to surpass. As with a Columbo mystery, the reader is made aware of the central violent act from the outset. The intrigue, drive and substance of the novel reside in the how and why. The plot unfolds in a series of letters from the culprit's mother, Eva Khatchadourian, to her estranged husband Franklin, yet the book has none of the shortcomings--remoteness, dearth of dialogue and characters, lack of "granularity"--that tend to afflict epistolary novels. The letter format simply allows the narrator to focus her agonized reflections about what she may have done wrong as a parent directly onto her main accomplice in child-rearing. That question does not admit of a clean answer, and Shriver does not indulge in writing a ruminating novel-of-ideas on the artificially stark nature/nurture question. This book is about particular people rather than archetypes, and the way their irreducible peculiarities--Eva's sardonic remove from both family and country, Franklin's infuriating guilelessness, Kevin's willful intelligence and perhaps an inborn kernel of evil--combine with a society that is alternately too pitiless and too forgiving to produce a terrible outcome that is hell to predict. The excellence of the novel derives from the author's refusal to burden the reader with vacuous homilies or "lessons," from her illumination of the possibility of reason in apparent randomness, and from her pervasive conviction that even the horrid has the virtue of poignancy. Kevin is a dark and unsettling fellow, and We Need to Talk About Kevin is a dark and unsettling book. Yet it rewards the reader with one of the most hard-earned--and soberly redemptive--endings I've yet encountered in fiction.

I'm not sure this is exactly a recommendation as I don't think most of the population is is even worthy of reading this amazing piece of literature. In fact, I'm not sure that I was worthy, but luckily the difference between being able to appreciate something and create it can be wider than an ocean, as our narrator might say.

Written from a smart female perspective(that I wouldn't call feminist as it is more personal than political), Kevin is an exploration of the human experience for any thinking person. The protagonist, Eva, tells a story that cannot always be trusted as her perceptions seem downright paranoid, at times. Or it could be that she is just easily recognizing character traits in her child that are so similar to her own. What is scary about Kevin is not that he is a foreign monster. What he says makes sense, but what he does is something else completely. You wonder if any thoughtful person wouldn't come to the same conclusions about existence that Kevin has come to; the only difference being that he is lacking empathy(the one thing that stands between most of us and sociopathology). Kevin cannot be so simply labeled a "bad seed" or an anitsocial and tossed aside; his is not a completely inaccessible character.

I read from beginning to end completely enthralled with every word. I found the ending riveting and revealing, but not because of what might be thought of as major events(those were well foreshadowed, if not outright stated), but because of some of the small events.

To those who thought the novel should be shorter, I can only say that I wished it had been longer. To those who thought that it was flawed because Kevin did not get psychiatric help, I suggest a reread and some investigation into the the efficacy of "therapy" with the characterologically disordered. And finally to those who thought it too "dark", I suggest some serious self reflection as well as a closer investigation of the world around you. To Lionel Shriver, I give a heart-felt thank you.

PS I found it hard to believe that Eva was not an atheist or that she never thought of herself as "particularly bright". Still, considering the talent and intelligence of Shriver, I can only assume that my disbelief is due to some error on my part as opposed to one on hers.

I was shocked to read the negative reviews- I am an avid reader and I absolutely loved this book. It is difficult to read, but it reflected the discomfort that Eva, the mother was experiencing.

As a "later in life mom" who had a thriving career, I related to her angst, selfishness and frustration with the changes in her marriage. I handled things differently, but it was easy to see how the road could have turned in a different direction.

I have been so extremely judgmental regarding school shootings- obviously, it must be the parents' faults, right? After reading this book, I can say that I don't know. Are some children so disturbed that they can't be helped? We acknowledge that adults can be disturbed or damaged, but yet have the illusion, as does the father in this novel, that children are inherently innocent.

I found the mother to be honestly confused, the father to be hopeful and blinded by love. I finished this book unable to answer the question why something like this happens, who was to blame, how Kevin felt about his mother-- it felt very genuine- no nice tidy bow that answers something so enormous.

It took a few days to shake the "ick" after reading this. It was a good ick- it made me think and look at something from an entirely different view. It's why I read.

I read through many of the reviews and noticed that not one person mentioned knowing someone like Kevin. I picked up this book after reading a review in an old magazine, not realising how hard it would hit home. I absolutely loved this novel, well written, encompassing, scary as hell, and sad. My nephew "Mike" is a bad seed. He committed murder/robbery/arson at the age of 17yrs and is going to jail for 25yrs in July. My sister and I knew when he was born, that something was wrong. All the traits that the character "Kevin" has, we have seen "Mike" exhibit. I kept my own kids away from him, period. My sister always thought that if she nurtured him enough, these nasty traits would go away. Eventually, she began to fear him, of upsetting him, of what he would do to his siblings. "Mike" has no empathy and a high threshold of pain - which - leads me to believe that contributes to his hate-filled antics. Yes, she took him to therapy, he was labeled ADD & bi-polar, the medication slowed him down a little, but the anger was still there.

This book will linger with you for days. When you read it, remember that there are monsters that are child-sized.

I'd read that this book was pretty good and as someone with an interest in school shootings - I was present when my alma mater had one - I didn't need to be sold on checking this book out. This review contains spoilers:

This must be noted immediately, as it is a problem apparent right from the start and never lets up: Shriver's vocabulary is incredibly pretentious. I don't know why her editor allowed so many uselessly huge words to litter the text, but nobody saw fit to change this. FYI: "vista" is a totally meaningless word, and when you use it you are broadcasting your excessive use of Microsoft Thesaurus. Unless the impractically large words were a literary device to illustrate how obnoxious the narrator is, there was no need for this.

Speaking of the narrator, I have read reviews that indicate the reader did not like the book specifically because the protagonist was unlikeable. I don't think that's a fair approach to literature. Just because you don't like the character, it doesn't automatically mean she was poorly developed or unrealistic. I didn't too much love Eva, but I don't think I needed to. Her underlying motivation is to decide whether or not she is responsible for her son Kevin's murderous rampage and whether you like her or not is irrelevant to the central focus of the book in my opinion. Eva is a supercilious glutton for punishment who makes poor choices regarding what's best for her family, her marriage, herself, and her children. But I think this is an accurate depiction of the sort of self-absorbed, self-satisfied wealthy white woman which fails as a parody. It may appear that Shriver wants you to hate Eva, but her true goal is to make you sympathize with her. Well, she succeeds in the surface goal which she obviously didn't mean to do.

Another recurring flaw is the constant discussion of other school shooters. It is unclear whether all of them really happened IRL or not because some feel contrived for the purposes of the story (a quick search on wikipedia confirms at least some of the names), and it feels too heavy handed. I think it takes something away from all the ruminations on Kevin's shooting when there is also so much focus on the others - not that any one mass murder is more "grand" than another, but the concept is over-saturated the way other shooters are constantly discussed. I think she'd have done well to avoid this.

Shriver's focus is posing the philosophical question of whether nature or nurture is responsible for the monster that is Kevin. My biggest issue with this book is that this entire premise, which the novel hinges itself on, is irrelevant. It doesn't work because right from the start it is plainly apparent that Kevin is a horrible little a-hole and nothing could have fixed that. The problem is that Kevin, and the other child Celia, are presented from birth with (sorry to use this word) unrealistically preordained personalities. There is no room for nurture to have a hand in the way Eva's children turn out because from birth they have such exaggeratedly pronounced personality traits. While theoretically it may be possible that Eva is an unreliable narrator and the truth was that her reactions to Kevin shaped him from birth, the tertiary characters disprove this - even as an infant Kevin was perceived by everyone around him (nannies, baby sitters, teachers, classmates) as unpleasant and disturbed. You can't ask whether a child could have turned out differently when you make it clear from the start that the child has always had these traits and nothing anyone did to intervene changed them. Part of this flaw is probably due to the fact - ridiculously relevant considering the subject matter of this book - that Shriver herself has no children. I don't either, but I have still observed enough to know that children don't have fixed personalities this way, especially at such a young age.

Kevin's evil nature is so pronounced and unavoidable that he feels like the devil incarnate. When he unexpectedly begins to speak at age three - in full sentences - I half expected him to laugh maniacally, exposing pointed white teeth and rolling around matching white eyes, and run madly around the room with demonic speed and strength. It just doesn't make sense to base the entire theme of the novel around the question of nature or nurture when the character is so obviously, unavoidably a bad seed. There is no ambiguity. I suppose Eva's dogged determination to find a way to blame herself could be a plot device to frame the story, but the author's afterword contradicts this. By the way, Eva's continual habit of jumping to the worst conclusion about every situation where Kevin may have done wrong suddenly failing her at the moment of the school shooting where she apparently doesn't think for a second that Kevin could have done it? Rings totally false.

While some view the character of Celia as a deliberately manipulative means to pull the heartstrings, I enjoyed her function in the plot. It is heart wrenching to think of such a sweet, harmless little girl being hurt. And despite Eva's constant expressions of love for her husband Franklin, he is so stubbornly deluded about Kevin that you almost want him to suffer his comeuppance. I definitely did not see the "twist" at the end that Franklin and Celia were both murdered by Kevin prior to the school rampage, and while I do think the previous language describing them IS manipulative in order to conceal this twist, I think it works.

Apart from these criticisms, this reveal is one of the most (if not THE most) redeeming factors about the book because it forces you to question everything before it and allows for many more interpretations about Kevin's evilness. There is little question what a monster Kevin is when you know he hates his loving father and sister so much that he kills them, but leaves Eva alive to suffer. It also suggests that Kevin's motive for the shooting is simply that he knows his mother doesn't love him (so as extra punishment, he kills the people she DOES love) and he's taken the petulance of "acting out" too far. This extra step of cruelty vindicates the feelings Eva has had all along and makes the big question of "why" a lot simpler - Kevin's just a hateful, murderous a-hole. There is no big philosophical reason. Kevin is an angry, privileged little a-hole whose sense of cultural entitlement went so far that it allowed him to take the lives of others because he felt he could, the same as any other school shooter.

It also justifies some of the other problems I had, such as why Shriver chose to keep Kevin odiously, frustratingly alive when most of these kids commit suicide, or why Eva doesn't simply write the kid off to rot instead of seeking his approval/understanding/abuse/whatever. You want him to die because he is so heinous but now you think having to live with himself - who is the person he really hates the most - is the greatest punishment of all. It was simply a clever and well-done twist that successfully achieves greater depth for both Eva and Kevin. Before this I'd almost decided the novel was self indulgent and meaningless, particularly when Shriver directly allows Kevin the opportunity to explain his motives and he not only spouts a bunch of crap but Shriver cuts him off for no reason in the story because as the writer she was out of stupid excuses and didn't really know what she was trying to say. But I think making Kevin not only a school shooter but a kid who murdered his loving father and sister was a great reveal allowing for more thought on human nature instead of on niche psychos.

While I'd have preferred more punishment for Kevin in the end, there was really no way for this story to have a happy ending, and as such is life. Shriver told a harrowing tale and whether you love it or hate it, it's one that will stick with you.

The story is well known (given the about of publicity that this book has received) - Kevin Khatchadourian killed seven of his fellow students along with a teacher and cafeteria worker shortly before his sixteenth birthday.

The book takes the form of a series of letters from his mother, Eva Khatchadourian to her husband, and Kevin's father, Franklin Plaskett about their life together and Kevin's upbringing. In these letters she attempts to make sense of this tragedy and determine her role in it.

The first half of the book is simply stunning. It is beautifully written in slightly arch prose; the prose as much as the sentiments expressed in the letters seems to capture Eva's character almost perfectly. Eva never liked Kevin; she considered her pregnancy an intrusion and never liked the child, even as a baby. She emerges as slightly unpleasant character (at the very least difficult): she can be selfish, cold and judgemental but she is by no means unsympathetic.

There is a lot going on in this complex book - the exploration of Eva's ambivalence to motherhood during her pregnancy and her lack of maternal feeling is beautifully handled. The use of the epistolary form is very successful. It allows Shriver to tell the story in a roughly chronological order while allowing scope for important digressions; furthermore the use of letters provides great insight into Eva. The approach also asks interesting questions of the reader, most importantly how reliable a narrator is Eva?

For me, the second half of the book is less successful. As the book progresses it becomes more plot driven and I felt that Shriver slightly lost her feel for Eva's voice; she ended up providing an absolute recounting of events rather than Eva's version. Furthermore, while Eva is a beautifully realised character all the other players are simply caricatures: Kevin is the epitome of passive aggressive evil, perfect child Celia merely a cipher and Franklin the dumb opposite to smart Eva.

Another problem with the book is the hype that surrounds it - when dealing with Eva's feelings about motherhood it is completely successful but it is not an exploration of what drives schoolboy killers (to be honest the film comedy Heathers probably has more to say on that subject).

Despite all these reservations I still think that this is a fantastic book - beautifully crafted and totally gripping.

Let me state from the outset of this two-star review that this book was easily one of the most well-written, gripping books I have encountered in years. There is hardly a dull sentence therein, and few books have held my attention so well. I tend to read slowly and thoughtfully, so it's unusual for me to finish a 400-page book within a work-week: this one I simply couldn't get away from. So why two stars?

For a start, it's a genuinely nasty and upsetting book which I still find myself profoundly dispirited by even now (just hours after finishing it). There are plenty of novels that have this effect on the reader, for good reasons and to good effect. If Nevil Shute's "On The Beach", for instance, depressed you with the reality of nuclear war, then impelling you to do something about it was a worthy bi-product of an otherwise dispiriting read. (Dr. Helen Caldicott's lifelong campaign against nuclear arms, for example, began after reading this book.) But Shriver's book does not belong in this category. Why?

Firstly, the novel is a monument to authorial mean-spiritedness. Celia, the delightfully super-sensitive and good-natured daughter is introduced into the story as blatant a foil to the unbearable Kevin. So her fate as a receptacle for his meanness is sealed from the start. But would kevin's appalling treatment of her have told us anything about him that we did not already know? By the time Celia arrives on the scene, the reader is already wearily thinking: "Kevin's nasty: we get it." In literary terms, therefore, the author gave birth to Celia purely in order to gratuitously abuse her.

Secondly, the cynicism and exploitation. The twin topics of this book are motherhood and massacre. But strip away the Grand Guignol finale (and ancillary violence), and what do you have? An interesting kitchen-sink drama, but one that wont sell too well. But topical bloodshed, however insensitive, will sell. So the author makes that the nail upon which an otherwise responsible and interesting examination of family life is hung. Or rather, impaled.

Thirdly, lack of credibility. Kevin's entire life is a chronicle of appalling behaviour and deformity of character. Yet as far as I can recall, there is not a single punishment meted out by either parent. Furthermore, Kevin's permanently gulled father is as unbelievable to the reader as he is over-believing to his wife. Eva's infinitely renewable self-scorn also exasperates. Following poor Celia's injury (an upsetting and cheaply nasty trick on the author's part), the cord of credibility which the plot dangles from snaps. A mother who genuinely believed that her son did this to her daughter would drive him from the house immediately. But that would encumber the plot, of course. Instead, Kevin remains suprisingly under-questioned on his version of the event, and life in the household simply goes on. What really happened reamins curiously unpacked by all parties involved: from Celia the victim, through her mother (who never asks Kevin about it during any of her prison visits), to Kevin himself (who boasts about his every nihilistic accomplishment but never discusses this). Somehow, that's a little too convenient for the author. The ambiguity around the event is therefore entirely phoney: Shriver hasn't kidded anyone. From this point on, the rest of the story never recovers, and it all strikes a long false note.

Fourthly, the red herring of Eva's 'questionable' first-person narrative. Unimaginative study groups in the US seem to be giving Shriver's novel a latter-day rendition of that rather Procrustean reading (so fashionable in the academy to this day) of "The Turn of the Screw", where the female narrator, driven by her own demons, dooms the two young children she is supposed to take care of. After all, much has been made of the epistolary structure of the novel (whereby we can never escape Eva's viewpoint), so 'students' are obliged to ponderously ask themselves if Eva's damning depiction of Kevin can be taken at face value. But unless Eva is making up whole sentences from Kevin's own mouth and grotesquely fabricating his response to his sister's ordeal (among other things), then the common-sense conclusion seems inescapable: the slovenly, vacuous and baleful Kevin is plainly a malevolent and useless human being. So what's there to cogitate on?

Fifthly, a garbled message. It has been bruited about in the press that this book 'offers no pat answers'. (Read: authorial cop-out.) Really? In fact, the 'answer' the author does provide bookends the novel: it's there in the opening quote, and in the incredulity-inducing closing lines, whose sheer nerve I found myself gasping at. If this is the 'moral' of a novel this mean, then it is a very twisted one indeed, all the more so so for being clumsily grafted onto a story whose villain clearly invalidates it.

So: two stars for genuinely superb prose. For everything else (the garbled theme, no responsibility to the reader, crass sensationalism used as bait for deeper issues, plot holes, the denouement): zero merit. For a truly interesting meditation on family tragedy, try judith Guest's "Ordinary People". That novel at least exhibits some responsibilty. And decency.

*****
"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a brilliant, creative, exciting, disturbing novel about a mother's relationship with her son Kevin, who murdered several of his classmates and others at his high school. The novel opens when Kevin is in prison, and is written from his mother's point of view, as she writes letters to her husband struggling to understand what might have gone wrong for her son to commit such a chilling crime.

She evaluates everything, from the beginning---their marriage before Kevin, deciding to have a child together---on---to how Kevin changed their marriage forever, each step of the way. The novel is composed of letter after letter to her husband, as she remembers, explores, and tries to understand. It is a fascinating read, compelling, but also very dark. I found myself identifying with her in her choices, and not knowing what to do at all as she would struggle with problem after problem.

After the school shootings in the late 1990's that were in the news, I wondered, along with many others, what was wrong with the parents that they didn't see the signs, or what could they possibly have done or not done to raise such a hardened and cruel child. This novel explores this question, with no definitive answers, perhaps because there are none. However, it makes the reader think, and empathize with the situation the parents face by immersing the reader in their world.

This novel is beautifully written, and if you are interested in the psychological puzzles surrounding the school shootings, should not be missed.
*****

"We Need to Talk About Kevin," by Lionel Shriver, is a nightmare of motherhood made real. It is a contemporary domestic horror story about a Columbine-like school massacre. The book deals with the crime of 15-year-old Kevin Khatchadourian, a boy who--with monstrous premeditation and extreme brutality--murders seven classmates, a cafeteria worker, and an English teacher. We are told these facts early in the story, but the full details are withheld until the end.

The book is the tale of Kevin's life told with unrelenting introspection from his mother's point of view. The story unfolds as a long series of letters from the mother, Eva, to her estranged husband, Franklin. The letters start one-and-one-half years after the murders, and end on the two-year anniversary some five months later. Eva's purpose in writing the letters is clear: she is overwrought with guilt and seeks to determine if she may have contributed to her son's crime by not loving him more. She hopes by recounting, in agonizingly raw detail, the story of her 18-year-long relationship with her son, that she will finally be able to uncover the truth--knowing the truth, she may then perhaps be able to come to terms with herself, and somehow get on with her life.

We reader wants to know the truth, too! So we grasp the covers of this book with white knuckles and are compelled, with ever-increasing disquieting fear, to read on. We read on despite the fact that we do not like this protagonist, or her miscreant son. We read on like a spectator in a slowly unfolding real-life horror story--we can't turn it off--we have to know all the details. Of course, ultimately, we do...and the ending is a terrific shocker made all the more so because the build up has been so intensely draining.

At one point in the novel, the author unintentionally mocks the voyeuristic interest of her readers. Kevin seems to speak directly to us during a TV interview after the crime. "All you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot. Bought and paid for. That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee. Ever since, I've known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up. Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll."

So what about the mother? Is she guilty? That question is never resolved in the book. It is left up to each reader to determine on his own. If you read the reviews, you'll see that the author has achieved some sort of balance between those readers who believe the mother is at fault, and those that believe that Kevin was just born bad.

I had a difficult time with this book. There were many times I wanted to just put it down and forget it, but I had promised to review it, so I stuck with it. Given other reviewers' reactions to this book, my own viewpoint is probably not typical. I am the type of person who switches off the TV during long, live, real-life horror news--not because it disturbs me, but rather because I loathe the entertainment circus, preferring my news filtered by reliable print journalists. I am also the type of reader who actively shuns autobiographies (and this is a fictional autobiography) because I am too conscious of the self-delusions that fill their pages with half-truths. Understanding real life takes multiple viewpoints to get us past our own self-delusions. When reading book-length coverage of horrendous true-life crimes, I prefer the journalistic integrity of a nonfiction specialist like Ann Rule. Now there's an author who turns out authentic real crime page-turners! When you finish one of her books, you know you've got the real answers behind the news.

I knew from the beginning of this dark tale that I'd never get a clear picture of events if we were only allowed one viewpoint, and that one from an immature, selfish, self-centered woman who obviously lacked a biologically normal degree of empathy. The mother and son were so much alike, what separated them was only the degree of their incapacity for empathy and therefore how much their handicaps hampered their life in general.

The epistolary structure of the novel was at times so artificial that it stretched my imagination past its breaking point. It was also far too restraining! Every thought, word, and remembered detail of dialogue by another character had to be filtered through Eva's mind. It put the reader in the prison of Eva's mind for the entire book. With such an unlikable character, I found this a most uncomfortable situation.

In an interview with the author in the Toronto "Globe and Mail" (July 7, 2004, p. R3), Shriver shares her thoughts about her own similarity to Eva. "I'm sufficiently close to her in type that it's hard for me to say I like or don't like her. I'm ambivalent about her in the same way that I'm ambivalent about myself. I gave her a lot of qualities that I believe I have in abundance but they are not necessarily likeable, and I don't necessarily find them likeable. I consider myself very selfish. I don't easily give up my time or energy to something that I don't get something out of. So the idea of spending morning after morning with a toddler drives me nuts. It would be killingly dull. And so I have a fun, interesting life. Travel. Write books. And die."

Although I can sincerely appreciate why this novel won the Orange Prize, I also had trouble with the author's prose. On the sentence and paragraph level, the writing was truly outstanding, but over the course of 400 pages it became painfully obvious that a good editor might have helped Shriver enormously. This book could have been far better with far less. She has a tendency to overwrite, and that, combined with the unrelenting introspection, guilt, and discordant tenor, made for some very tough slogging. To say the least, this was not a fun book to read.

I am pleased that I finished this book. In the end, the book left me with a chilling and disturbing portrait of Eva Khatchadourian, a woman of little empathy trying to raise a son perhaps void of any empathy at all. Over the course of 400 pages, I came to understand and care about this fictional woman. She has my sympathy, despite the fact that if I ever met her I'd go out of my way to avoid any further contact. I've met others like her--these are extremely difficult people. Typically there exists great devastation in and around their personal lives and they seek to draw you into it. I avoid such people, but when I can't, I remember to be as forgiving and understanding as I can while still managing to be on my guard at all times.

My take on the title is that the author wants us, the readers, to "Talk about Kevin"--in our heads, as well as with our friends...and in this manner spread interest for the book like a contagion. Given the book's enormous marketing success over the past four years, I'd say this tactic has succeeded beyond the author's wildest dreams.

So, I recommend this book, but with significant reservations. If you've never known a woman like Eva, then this is your opportunity to do so without endangering yourself in the process. Also, if you like horror genre fiction with a feminist twist and a lot of excellent literary overtones, then this may be exactly your cup of tea.

Nature or nurture? We all ask that question as we watch our kids grow and develop. But what if your child ends up committing a crime so heinous that there can be no satisfying answers? As the mother of "Kevin" strives to understand his actions in retrospect through a series of written letters, she brutally dissects herself, her marriage and Kevin's personality and upbringing with a starkness and honesty rarely seen in any literature. This book is not for the faint of heart (Kevin's antics are more than upsetting) and Kevin's father's unrelenting and unquestioning support of his clearly disturbed young son is enough to drive anyone mad. Shriver pulls these characters off beautifully...without blame, villains, heroes, apologies...or answers.

This was an intriguing and thought-provoking read. The reader is invited into the inner world of a parent whose child committed a horrible murder. Eva K had two children and, unfortunately, her first child Kevin, was unresponsive to her hesitant attempts to form an attachment to him and this only made their relationship all the more distant. The second child was an easier child to raise, a cheerful and animated young girl to whom it was easy to form an attachment. One can only imagine whether or not Eva would have felt less rejected by Kevin if Kevin had been born after the daughter. There are children like Kevin, who even in infancy reject touch and are distant and emotionally unresponsive. Parents of children like this need help not to feel rejected by their own offspring. (and these kids do not necessarily turn out to be murderers)

What disturbed me about this book (and about the group discussion questions at the back of the edition I have) was that all focus is on Eva's parenting, as if the father, Franklin, in his overindulgence of Kevin and his constant belittling of Eva's mothering, had no impact on Kevin's development. Would Kevin have been able to come out of his shell if his father had been supportive of his mother? if his father would have been realistic about the developmental problems his son had? if they had gone to family therapy? (sorry, I'm a family therapist)

Throughout the book I felt the pain of Eva's inability to connect with her son and Kevin's pain of being so alone in the world. I was angry at Franklin for his arrogance.

It was refreshing to see some light shed on the ambivalence of parents toward having children and toward the children born to them. It is an important topic to open up for discussion so that ambivalent parents are not shamed into silence; it is only open discussion that will help them deal with their negative feelings toward their children in order for those feelings not to interfere with their ability to raise their children well.

There are a few minor points in the book that made it clear to me that Shriver never had children even before I read her bio to know that fact for sure. But this did not detract in the least from my enjoyment of her book.

I found this book to be too real and too believable. The coldness of the main character is perfectly appropriate when you consider she is telling the story 'backwards'. Eve's character is acting to protect herself and I would say that she is as traumatised as any of the other families who lost children, if not more because she has to shoulder blame and grief. I think the apparent insubstantiality of the characters Celia and Franklin is also perfect when you consider the emotional perspective of Eve as she writes the letters to Franklin. To me it seemed the emotional distance and objectivity was necessary to keep her from falling apart.

I just finished reading "We Need to Talk about Kevin" and had to fight an instinct to look for an article on Kevin and Eva on the Internet. That's how real this book is. The clarity of the author's voice, the progression of events and the tone of the novel are structured so perfectly that it's almost as though you are reading someone's long ago abandoned diary with yellowed pages. What makes this book so powerful is that it unflinchingly takes you to a dark place and confront the painful and, yes, helpless reality of what these character's are facing. But when you get through this emotional roller coaster, you feel incredibly rewarded to know that there is a novel this well written out there on the bookshelves.

Some have criticized the fact that Franklin seems so passive in light of the horrible things his son is doing. But people who make those criticisms should ask themselves whether, when faced with the option of facing up to the evil things their child is doing or simply refusing to accept them, they would not make the same choice. As for the big climax, this is one thing in the book that I feel was a mistake. It was unnecessary and the author would have achieved her vision without it. I think the most heartbreaking and brilliant part of the novel are the last four pages. I don't usually reread books, but I read these last few pages several times because they were so poignant and combined together so many emotions: pity, despair, hopelessness, forgiveness and even hope. I've only cried at the ending of two books: one was by Ernest Hemingway. The other was by Lionel Shriver.

My first impression of we need to talk about Kevin was that is must be a psuedo-psychologic tale of what sort of upbringing would result in a teenage boy engaging in a Columbine-type massacre.

But much of this tale is playing on expectations, the author toys with blaise themes and cliche then throws them from a window to treat us to a hellish ride through a mother's life with a psychopathic child.

Shriver, rides close to melodramic (I'm sure i've read some of of Kevin's horrible behaviours before, the author it seems has taken some nightmare of every possible senario and pushed them into this book) yet somehow brings us to tears with the realism of her story.

Eva's narrative makes us feel horror, disgust, pity, frustration, hate and love. This book isn't a fact-list for what makes a serial killer, the author seems strongly in the nature camp, exemplified by the fact that its revealed from the beginning what he did, and his nature is obvious from the beginning.

What this book is, is a exploration of the horror of family life with an eventual killer. Part facts of life, psychological thriller, parenting trials the book is impossible to put down.

Even the slow, shrill and slightly boring beginning where we explore the married life of the parents before Kevin has its place. Everything about the book is important to understand the characters and to truly experience their lives.

Its hard to find fault with this novel, it is a long read, which combined with the compulsion to finish it makes for many hours reading.

The thought of why didn't the parents do something about Kevin sooner, enters the readers' heads but Eva explains herself, and I felt a strange empathy for Franklin, while I don't have a psychopathic child, I do understand that when family goes through something heavy, such as mental illness, denial is sometimes the only thing that gets one through.

This is probably the only book that has actually made me 'think' (as in it'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry, it'll make you think. For a literary genre book there are a surprising number of twists, unexpected yet so fitting turns in the plot (towards the end I only just realised what was happening a few paragraphs before the event). And even up to the very last paragraph, you'll be shocked. I promise.

We Need to Talk is an emotionally exhausting rollar coaster, but one that I'm incrediably glad I took. Possibly the best book I've read in years.

This is one of the best books I have read all year & may be in my top 20 of all time. This is a dense, meaty read full of complex ideas & painful moments leavened by its utter believability & unexpected touches of wry wit & sardonic humor.

Eva, the mother of a school shooter, is writing to her ex-husband about their son. It is apparent from the very beginning of the letters that something was wrong with Kevin, although his father refused to see it. Ms. Shriver dares to write about all the ways that pregnancy is deprivation & physical misery. She explores the equally taboo notion that bearing a child doesn't mean you automatically love said child & the fact that some children are born with various parts of themselves broken.

The relationships & people in this book are believable. The pace is inexorable & grinds the reader into pulp along with the characters. It's form absolutely fits its function & where it could easily have been clunky is instead engrossing & fluid. It is powerful, beautifully written, & utterly intelligent. This is an absolute must-read.

Although I found this book to be written about very disturbing subject matter, I also found it to be very well written and compellingly readable. The mother of Kevin chronicles the ongoing crisis situation of an upwardly mobile New York couple and their decision to start a family. Dire consequences follow when their first child is nearly 16. The "narrator," in a series of letters to her huband reveals what happened with tantalizing glimpses of her life at present and the life of her family in the past.

Shriver also makes sly yet poignant commentary on American culture throughout the book, and it really works in this context, not ever coming across as condemning or preachy. She writes what is real, and gives life to her characters in the suburban, upper-class environment they live in.

I don't want to give too much of this book away, but Shriver does an excellent job with this storyline. This is sophisticated writing with incredible character development and a great story that actually has meaning, something that seems to be lacking in so much popular literature of the day.

I almost didn't finish this book because I was put off by Eva's initial whiny voice and because I have a hard time taking fiction in the form of a letter seriously - especially when the writer is telling the reader things he obviously already knows.

I ended up putting the book down after about 80 pages. I didn't really care about Eva's marital problems, I wanted to know more about her son (about which I felt guilty after I read her son's speech about how America is addicted to killers), but the book was turning out to be more about her and why she never wanted children - background information that seemed impertinent at the time but adds much to the story.

Eventually, I started reading again, and this time around the book enthralled me. I couldn't put it down. While it took me a week or two to get through the first 100 pages or so, I sailed through the rest of this book in only a few days. Eva's experiences with her son are frightening. That her husband never believes her stories about Kevin's evil doing adds to the horror. And that you eventually sympathize with Eva and understand some of Kevin's points of view (about the meaninglessness of life) can be scary too - because they are both disgusting, but very real, people. This is a must read.

I read this novel for a book group I am involved in. The chairwoman had read it and thought very highly of it. Now I see why.

Reading through the book we are aware what shall happen. The shock is in the way it happens. Through the letter's Kevin's mother Eva writes to her estranged husband a picture of Kevin's life before the killings emerges. The fact that he is almost impossible to relate to and unapologetic for his wrongdoing has us build up contempt for Kevin. Yet reading the penultimate letter Eva writes made me feel like someone was piling weights onto my back. The cold intelligence and lack of empathy that Kevin shows in perpertrating his killings is truly harrowing.

Then comes the final letter, which puts such a spin on the rest of the book you will want to go right back and read it again, with a different point of view. If you're not part of a book group like I am, the best way to read this book is to ask someone else you know to read it at the same time as you. As I say, you could discuss it forever.

All too rarely is a book prize winner worthy of the prestige the award bestows upon it. If that's what you're thinking, believe me, you won't be feeling the same way about the new Orange Prize winner after you've read it. Lionel Shriver's "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is truly rivetting, a totally engrossing read and an outstanding novel that handles its difficult subject with such a searing degree of honesty and with such a clarity of vision and perception you don't have to be a mother to realise that ultimately parenting isn't a science, not even an art and that the influence one has in the shaping of the personality of one's offspring isn't as dominant a factor as one would like to think. Narrated through a series of unanswered letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, in the aftermath of their son Kevin's slaughter-fest, Eva leaves no stone unturned as she unearths and examines every bit of detail of her relationship with Kevin from the time of his birth to the present in order to understand her own failings as a mother, her own culpability. Funny, isn't it, how all mothers think they are the baker and their children their bread ? That Shriver should allow Eva to draw a blank after her exhaustive and harrowing introspection isn't surprising or cheating for having let off Eva lightly. It's only telling it like it is. Only Eva knows deep down inside she cannot take responsibility for the way Kevin turned out. Look at how he repaid his father's sensitive nurturing. Kevin's the changeling child from hell, the devil incarnate from "The Omen" but that's Eva's secret her naive husband refuses to share in.

Kevin may be the devil incarnate but what drove him to the rampage ? Now here's rub. Kevin understood the society that spawned him. He knew where and how he could get his two minutes of fame and watch his mother turn overnight into a second liner celebrity icon (after him, of course) and being skewered for his crime and "bringing him up wrong". That, for Kevin, would be like scoring a double victory, having his cake and eating it. Shriver's indictment of American society, one that has come to take everything that's good and right for granted when they remain hopelessly out of reach for many people elsewhere in the world, and one that expresses uncomprehending outrage when it's snatched away (albeit momentarily) from them, is a timely caution against complacency and self satisfaction. In other words, you don't want to end up like Franklin in the story.

"We Need To Talk About Kevin" digs real deep and hits a couple of painful spots if you're a parent. Though emotionally harrowing, the close and clammy truths the novel reveals and Shriver's razor sharp no holds barred prose makes it an utterly rewarding and resonant read. One of the very best this year. A brilliant novel you shouldn't miss !

Wow. Others have already described what this book is about, so I won't waste more time & space doing so. Suffice it to say that this book is extremely well-written; Lionel Shriver has an immense vocabulary and a skilled way of using it.

Although the essential plot of the book -- boy kills fellow high school students -- is stated from the get-go, the book is still suspenseful because you keep reading to find out why. Whether that is ever answered is something for each reader to find out.

I will say that I disagree with the reviewer who stated that this book makes it clear that it is the parents' fault that their son turned murderous. On the contrary, that is never made clear at all. There is no doubt something was "wrong" with Kevin from the very start, perhaps something so wrong that it could not have been made right.

Lastly, many reviewers have spoken of a shocking plot twist. Surely I am not the only reader who saw this coming a mile ahead? But what is truly amazing about the power of the book is that this foreknowledge did not dilute the horror of the moment one iota.

I cried when this book ended. It is a shattering read in many respects that will stay in my memory. I will definitely look for more of Ms. Shriver's work.

Well, this is about as good as it gets. This finely-crafted, intricately-woven novel blew me away. If you are considering this for a book discussion group, the discussion will be endless...there is so much to talk about. The author gives the reader all the information on this "problem child" and then allows the reader to draw their own conclusion, including the possibility that there is no definitive conclusion. The author's ability in this book boggles the mind.

This is one of the best books I've read in a while and I read everything! It is riveting, creepy, intelligent, and profound. I just devoured it. It's one of those stories that stays with you long after you finish the last page. This was my first book of Lionel Shriver's and I can't wait to read more of her stuff. Great book!

This book was unlike anything I have ever read. In the beginning it took a little while to get used to the authors expansive vocabulary, but once it clicked for me I couldn't wait to read more. The story is told in a series of letters and although that sounds difficult to read it was actually a very clever concept. You are immediately on the mother's side from the birth of Kevin and it is an wonderful look from the her perspective. I thought about this book for days after reading it and was disappointed when I finished it (only because it was over). I would highly recommend this book - it will leave you feeling haunted, but it is very fulfilling throughout and the end leaves you with complete closure.

I'm not a parent, but I know enough about parents (having had two of my own) to be enjoying this novel and its comforting and confirming notion that, whether a child turns out to be a serial killer or a carpet salesman, a pedophile or a filmmaker, the parents of said child will be supremely disappointed. As Woody Allen once said of his mother (or words to this effect) "She still thinks I should have become an accountant - to have a back-up profession." Add to the mix a narcissistic, globe-trotting mother who has been nudged into parenthood against her better judgment, and you get Kevin - although which came first, the chick(hater) or the egg(hater) is just one of the many tantalizing mysteries in this first-rate book. I'm still reading (actually, listening to) it on CD, and it's making me think of my own relationship with my mother, who was cold, brittle and critical, but who, for whatever biological/sociological reasons caused me to become a writer and artist. I've been accused, on occasion of those careers, of being a serial killer myself. "You'll kill your parents!" I have been cautioned, by well-meaning family critics, when I turned out unflattering autobiographical poetry and prose. Look what happened to Truman Capote when he "assassinated" several friends in "Answered Prayers." So - the point is - well, as Eva insinuates - there almost is no point. It's all pointless to conjecture. Did he do it because Eva was a cold, "diffident" mother? (After all, that was the word she used to describe her initial reaction to her newborn - and as Kevin was delivered into her arms post birth, no less, which surely gave the baby a chill.) Or was he simply an evil, calculating psychopath from day one - a bad seed? I'm still listening, so there may be a denoument ahead. In any case, I'm loving this novel, which trounces the concept of "saintly motherhood." Some women have that lovin' feeling, but I am certain that many, many more than anyone cares to acknowledge - have not. Remember "My Mother, Myself?" This book is a brutal, fictional - but true - reminder that Mommydom's not all it's cracked up to be.

In contrast with city schools in high-crime areas where violence in the form of bullying, perhaps the occasional fist fight or even stabbing can be prevalent, school massacres perpetrated by students most often occur in middle class suburbs, receiving mass media attention due to the irregularity of their occurence. The whys and wherefores of these acts have been examined extensively, a natural compulsion of humanity to seek someone or something to blame, the idea of innate evil too much to bear.
Shriver's astute novel addresses the question of why a well-off teenager from a good family such as Kevin would commit such an act in a sensitive and compelling way that gives a real philosophical insight into the human psychee.
Written effectively as an engaging series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her estranged husband Franklin, the story is told of how her 15 year old son Kevin came to murder in cold blood seven of his fellow classmates and two of the school staff. A perceptive to the point of frightening account is given of the effects of such a vile act on the mother herself, the family, and wider repercussions on the community.
Eva is often self-deprecating, her introspection displaying an individual eaten up by inner turmoil, guilt and anxiety she gives the archetypal reaction of `Was I a bad mother, was it my fault?', always eager to draw attention to her own faults, as this is what she has come to expect from other people.
Eva sees a malicious, malevolent Kevin, trying to love him, yet not being able to find anything to love when the only tenderness he ever shows is a ruse designed to fool his father and infuriate his mother. The fact that Kevin hides his true self from his father, perhaps the one redeeming feature for Eva, the one positive that she gleans from the entire situation: She knows her son's genuine personality, because he chooses to show it to her.
A fantastically gripping novel, I highly recommend this book. The story calling on the reader to experience emotions as diverse as disgust, hatred and compassion, even on occasion toward Kevin, truly is an emotional and rewarding read.

What a powerful, powerful book this is! Deeply disturbing, yet so compellingly written, and so incredibly honest. Kevin is a fascinating character, but I think the mother, who narrates the account of her son's murdering spree, is the real reason this novel works so well. She is sympathetic at times -- who wouldn't sympathize with a mother who has to go through this kind of ordeal -- but only because we occasionally see her very human side, full of flaws -- like when she throws her young son across a room in anger and breaks his arm. This is not just a story about a mass murderer; it's really more a confession of a mother who is struggling to determine where she may have failed. The narrative exquisitely builds in dramatic tension as Kevin's cruelty towards others get more and more serious. It's a train wreck that you see coming a mile away, and yet the suspense is palpable throughout. Despite it's disturbing content, I would recommend this book to anyone, as long as they have a strong enough stomach for it.

It is so rare to find a book that you can't put down but also one you don't want to end. Lionel Shriver has written one of the most introvertive, terrifying novels about a family doomed from the very start for tragedy, in exquisite prose and with everyday details that make us believers. She still has me wondering if it really is a novel or her personal experience. She makes us laugh while we're afraid of what the humor relates to. Early on her detailing of deciding on their son's name had me in hysterics, and these refreshing asides are dotted throughout. Although there are very subtle hints along the way they do nothing to solve the plot except to add excruciating suspense. All through the reader knows something's afoot and although we know it's not anything that can be avoided, it is in the past, it's done, but what?, is the question that is answered so terrfiyingly not until the very end. The anxiety builds until the very end. Not often does a daily journal after the fact present such anticipation, which is more than fully satisfied. Congratulations Ms. Shriver. I am now ordering several more copies as this must be discussed and enjoyed among friends.

This is a superbly written novel that will take its readers into the dark recesses of a mother's heart. Early in the novel, I attempted to understand what made Kevin the way he was; later, I held my breath awaiting the inevitable emotional and/or physical destruction that he would inflict. The ultimate mystery is not what created someone without any feelings of connection, but why his father couldn't accept the horrendous workings of his son's mind before the ultimate tragedies. Kevin's interactions with his mother were heartbreaking and cannot, I believe, be understood by anyone without a psychopath in his or her life. This book is totally absorbing and has left a dent in my heart.

I loved this book. The character of the mother was revealed so well in the form of letters to her husband. The evolution of the criminal son in the letters along with the loss of the marriage and ultimately everything was just so inevitable. I kept wanting to shake Eve and tell her to run, run. But she didn't and that was the thing that caused the most afterthought. I wanted to know what happened over the years she visited her son, if a relationship ever formed. For all the darkness, it seemed to me there was a tiny ray of hope at the end. But this book will stay with me for a long time.

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ms. Shriver attempts to tell the story of events, reasons, undercurrents leading up to a school massacre. The story is told from the point of view of Eva, the mother of the murderer, in the form of letters Eva is writing to her husband.

This is a very large undertaking and the premise is great. Ms. Shriver has an excellent story to tell, and at times it is well told and even gripping.

Unfortunately, the very style of the story (letters describing events to a person who was there) was a draw back. It made for very awkward language as Eva told Franklin what he already knew (with such phrases as "You told me. . . ", "You gave me. . . ") and gave a very egocentric feel to the novel from the first page, as Eva describes her her life to one who knows it intimately. I suppose this was to set up for surprises later in the book, but it simply didn't work.

The story of Eva's relationship with her husband and son would have made for interesting reading, but it was so hard to get past the fact that I was reading a novel, due to the self-important (and unrealistic) style and language. This is "a novel", and the reader is not going to forget it. There were times, though, that the story was interesting enough for me to over look this (hence the 2 stars instead of 1), but those instances were few.

In addition, We Need to Talk About Kevin is simply too long. Ms. Shriver spends too much time on details and issues that don't add to the story and that could easily have been pared. Other school shooting incidents discussed in detail, the 2000 election fiasco in Florida referred to again and again, feelings examined in minutiae. . . This book weighs in at 400 pages in oversized paperback, and would probably have been a good novel if 1/4 of that had been left out.

Another difficulty I had with We Need to Talk About Kevin was the discussions (generally arguments) between Eva and Franklin (recounted in detail by Eva to Franklin despite the fact he was there) about their son. These conversations were not realistic, read like how a young person might imagine adults talk, and certainly did not read like adults talking about their own children. Perhaps Ms. Shriver intended this, used it show the difficulty between Eva and Franklin. Perhaps, but to this reader it did have any purposeful use, and made reading even more difficult.

Due to the over-scrutiny, the self-importance and the length, by the time the book ended, the "surprise" was no surprise and the ending was simply a relief. If Ms. Shriver had kept with just the basic story, and had Eva give it in a different format, this could have been a stellar read. As it is, I advise you give it a miss.

Where to begin? Let's start with the fact that motherhood is viewed from what is likely a very unpopular cultural perspective. That's the first thing that got my attention when I saw this on the table at Barnes and Noble and then bought a few more copies on Amazon to give to folks so I would have someone to talk to about it. I thought, this is interesting...someone is actually going to acknowledge in writing, that not every woman in America wants to bear children.

That right there takes chutzpah.

Not only is the protagonist unabashed in her desire not to give birth, but she is just as pointed in her decision to have the child because she wants the man (e.g., her husband) that comes with the baby she doesn't really want, but oh well. Whoa! I'm lovin' it. Gutsty, gutsy. "Punchline": The child turns out to be a psychopath. Hmmm, bad mama or bad seed...?

None of the main characters are particularly likeable. Yet for me, one of the many gifts of this jewel of a novel is that despite not personally liking the father, son, or mom, I found their characterizations by Shriver to be luminously compelling. And while I didn't "like" them, her gift as a writer allowed me some sense of sympathy. I mean, all around bad choices. Who among us is perfect? I can relate to that human condition in general, if not to the heinous specifics of this particular family.

I thought, where on earth can this woman (Shriver) possibly go with this story? And all I will say is that she blew my mind FIVE TIMES: 1) with her writing, it is so beautiful; 2) the juxtapostion of this rose blossom of craft and the thorns of a truly dark tale, 3) the first suprise toward the end; 4) the second surprise even closer to the end, and 5) the last surprise, which is also the very last line of the book, which made me gasp it was so creatively courageous. FABULUSH! I ran out and literally bought everything this woman has ever written and I'm into the fourth book of my Lionel Shriver Library. Bon appetit!

"We Need to Talk About Kevin" starts out very strong... I couldn't put it down until page 150. Then, more than once over the next 150 pages, I got annoyed. Despite its perfectly detailed writing, the conceit (the entire novel is a series of letters) and sheer length (400 pages, in a smaller than usual typeface) of this story strained my patience. Thankfully, Lionel Shriver understands something about payoff. The end of this book had the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Wow. Very well done. What would have been a four star review gets a bump due to the thoroughly satisfying ending.

Clearly Shriver can write. I especially love how small, well chosen details convey characters so well. I love the letter in which Eva describes her husband purely through his quotidian interests. She has also taken on an unwieldy topic -- senseless murder. To a certain extent this debate has already occured a million times in the media, with conclusions no more conclusive than what Shriver can come up with. That's the condondrum of senseless things... there aren't any profound answers. For these reasons (quality of writing and ambition of subject) I think this is one of the better books I've read this year.

I had read a lot of Amazon reviews of We Need to Talk About Kevin in trying to decide whether or not to buy it, and the majority of the reviews (even if they were positive) talked about their open disdain for the narrator, Eva. So starting the book I had a preconceived notion that I wouldn't like Eva and might find it difficult to read from her perspective. So in reading it, I really related to her and felt for her from the beginning. I kept waiting to get to that part in the book where I didn't like her, but it never came. I didn't like her choices and could not understand for the life of me why she did the things she did, but I always felt like she was a sympathetic character. As a woman who has always questioned whether or not to have children, I understand how that essential question can loom over you and how there is no easy answer to it. I did relate to many of her ten reasons for not wanting to have children (including less time for the two of us, social demotion and dementing boredom), but even moreso applauded her bravery for spelling out her feelings against having kids. In our society, that is not always an easy thing for women to do. It is generally accepted that all happily married women will have kids and to go against the social grain and defiantly say that you do not want children is generally regarded as selfish and against nature. Once she did have Kevin, it didn't go as smoothly as the diaper commercials would have us to believe. She questioned whether or not she did the right thing in having him, she didn't fall in love with him instantly, and the maternal feelings didn't kick in as easily as portrayed. Again, this isn't something that we talk about in our culture. We are lead to believe the baby is born, you immediately fall in love with him or her, you go home and live happily ever after. You are happy to give up the life you had before the baby, and in some respects, give up yourself because you are a mother. And that title outranks all others before it.

I also felt that this book did a good job of being open to all possibilities. We try to answer the question "why", when there is no reason or there are multiple reasons. Kevin wasn't just some kid who was picked on and harassed daily, he was often the aggressor. He did not become a mass murder because his mom was cold and distant or because he had a lousy childhood. He did not do it because he listened to heavy metal music and played violent video games. The book was honest and true and didn't try to force an answer to the why question. It really forces you to look at things from many angles and think about those deep questions we'd rather not think about. This novel offers no answers. As there really are not a lot of answers to be found in these situations.

It also leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Why would Eva stay in such a horrible situation? Why would she continue to visit her son in prison and accept him into her home? And to be honest, the characters were pretty black and white. Kevin was all evil, only becoming a slightly round character at the end of the novel. Eva was always perceptive, yet detached. Franklin was the blind idiot, blindly following his American dream into tragedy. Other than wishing for more rounded characters, her writing was superb. An excellent, excellent book that I can't stop thinking about.

The publicity surrounding the awarding of Britain's Orange Prize to Shriver (for the best novel in the English language published by a woman) said that 20 publishers turned down "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Or was that 30? At any rate, that's a clue to how grating the first fifty or so pages of this novel are, as Shriver puts us in the head of Kevin's mom, Eva, as she overthinks the conception and birth of her firstborn.

That is not a comfortable place to be. Eva is that still-odd self-made American woman, a woman who turned her penchant for cheap foreign travel into a thriving publishing house of guides. It is her identity in that role that she clings to as her husband, whom she treasures, pulls her toward motherhood and the suburbs. Eva's struggle against these forces, including her self-imposed stereotypes, sets her up for what is to follow, and readers should question her reliability as a narrator.

The Columbine connection aside, this is ground covered by Doris Lessing in "The Fifth Child," a novel of the 1970s that the Orange judges must know well. Lessing proffered the premise that there is such a thing as a bad seed, a child who from birth is bent on evil. Early on, Eva seems to agree with her, but Shriver's premise is far more complicated. As I read her, it's possible that an infant's peculiarities can be so misread by its parents that they nurture a monster while following their best intentions. That's far scarier, and it helps explain some readers' aversion to this powerful and challenging book.It's not a book to read before you fall asleep at night, but one to read in a full, upright position in daylight.

Other reviewers have noted Shriver's devastating skewering of atrocity-driven media. I would also urge readers to look to her portrait of the novel's "innocents," Eva's husband, Franklin, to whom the novel is addressed, and their daughter, Celia, who Eva finds an easy baby but never adequately protects. Being good passively is not enough, she seems to say. We deceive ourselves at our own peril. Only the strong, like Eva and Kevin, survive in this America, and what they inherit isn't what they long for.

The one exception to this grim assessment is Dana Rocco, a teacher who sees through Kevin's bluster to the emptiness it hides. "Tell Kevin I'm on to him," she tells Eva at parent-teacher conference. Sadly, she's too late

The author is brilliant. This book is dark, honest, beautifully written and leaves one with more questions, ambivalence about the mother, shock, sadness and lingering desire to know more than any book I have read in years. I wanted it to continue, I wanted to know what happened in her quest to finally, too late, have a relationship with this terrible child. I see why it is regarded as a secret feminist novel. After all the child did destroy the marriage, the husband, the sibling and the mother along with her career, financial well being and her very soul. Isn't that what some feminists think about children? But somehow I don't think the author intended that view. This book has an honest and penetrating depicting of characters that I would expect from a much older author. I will look for this author, she is really good. And I still want to know what happened after the end of this book. It is so very dark but some teeny ray of hope was there at the end, almost unbelievably so. I won't forget this book for a very long time if ever.

I appreciate what the author is trying to accomplish with this novel, and for that, I commend her. However, I found the writing to be overly indulgent, as if to show off in some way rather than truly building believable characters. To me, that was the book's main flaw: the characters were too broadly drawn, too much in stark contrast to each other, to really feel real. I can see why someone would put the book down after about 50-60 pages; I almost did the same. But I kept going and found it to improve somewhat, although I found the last third to be heavy handed and rather dull. It's OK to have a main character who is unsympathetic--which she was, to me--as long as there is a connection to reality. But overall, Eva and the rest seemed more like caricatures than real characters. I just didn't believe them. I'm also surprised that an editor didn't ask her to modify some of the details. One that stands out for me is the fact that Kevin wasn't speaking by 18 months. If Franklin is supposedly reading all the baby books, why isn't he alarmed? Why aren't they seeking professional help, at that point? Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, since it appears Kevin suffered from an extreme form of sociopathy/psychopathy. But considering Eva's instability and her mother's mental illness, wouldn't Eva and Franklin be a bit more clued in to possible problems in their son and seek help early? A lot of it just didn't add up and seemed, frankly, sloppy. Would I recommend this book? No. Would I read another book by this author? I don't think so. I do admire her attempt to write about a difficult subject and tackle the ambiguities inherent in parenting. I just wish the book had succeeded.

Just finished this book. Whew...!It's written completely in the form of letters from a woman to her husband (who's obviously not living with her anymore). In them, she's retracing the past, trying to work out the how and why of the fact that their teenage son had gone off to school a year or two before and killed 7 classmates, 1 teacher, and a cafeteria worker.

It's not usually the kind of book I'd start on, but a colleague and friend really recommended it. I did not find it 'easy' reading. Aside from the subject matter, which I have something of an antipathy to, it's rather a long book for the letter style, and the sole voice adds to the oppresiveness of the subject matter. However - does this author ever have a way with words!! Her ability to describe thoughts and feelings in unusual and moving ways made it more than worthwhile. From the very first paragraph:

"Since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards."

It's a style, I think, that will either grab you right away or annoy the hell out of you. She (Eve) is absolutely not what you'd call a bad, nasty or evil woman - at worst, perhaps a bit self-absorbed. She's extremely intelligent, has a wry sense of humour, and is a succesful businesswoman who loves her husband very, very much. They were both ambivalent about having kids to start with, and she certainly wasn't prepared for a child like Kevin.

The Observor called it "An elegant psychological and philosophical investigation of 'culpability'" - and that's what it comes down to. Eve picking back through her memories and motivations - the story is constructed as she tries to pin down exactly the subconscious things that drove her own actions and reactions to her son in an effort to make sense of it all. In a way, the book is every bit as much about her as it is about her Kevin - perhaps even more so. Their interactions are the dance that defines the story. I found it exhausting at times, but I also can't count how often I stopped to re-read a paragraph for the sheer pleasure of the deft virtuousity of the author's wording. Almost everyone is aware, I think, of how intricate and sometimes contradictory the workings of their own mind and heart can be, but rarely have I come across a writer who can pin that down, in all its complexity, in mere words.

Something else I liked about it was the way it matter-of-factly (although not overtly) questions the universally acknowledged truth that a wedded woman with fertility and security must be in want of a child. I know that many do - God bless them - they're the soldiers who keep the human race going. But it's not for everyone. Parenthood is an awesome, exhausting responsibility. CNN has examples practically every day of 'parents' who shouldn't have been allowed to keep a dog. Many embark upon it, I imagine, out of pure ignorance or boredom, with precious little resources - mental, physical or financial - and with disastrous results. When I read about children who have been roasted to death in a car because their too-young single mother couldn't find a babysitter while she was at work, I don't quite know who or what I want - or should - rage and howl against.

But in this book, we're talking about financially secure, intelligent folks in their mid-30s who debated the pro's and con's, discussed what they were getting into, had an idea of what they'd have to give up, and thought they were ready to make whatever personal sacrifices necessary - and still it went terribly wrong. This is not the social mileau where people leave their infants or toddlers to boil to death in locked cars while they're doing something else, but it does seem to be the one that produces the children of Columbine.

In short, this book actually raises more more sophisticated questions about what being a 'good parent' is all about. It's also to its credit that it doesn't try to supply pat answers, although I did find oblique (and comforting for me) references to them in the very last pages. Definitely intriguing and rewarding to some, but not to all.

I might have said "weird-O" ending but I enjoyed the book so much that I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt. But I can't let her off the hook that easily.

This book is a horrifying and heartbreaking journey into the heart of a mother whose 16 year-old son,we are told from the outset, recently murdered many of his fellow students, a cafeteria worker and the teacher who "knew" him.

We follow the malevolent little Kevin from his unpleasent infancy through a particularly destructive and cruel childhood (in this case, HE is the destructive an cruel party). Then we watch him develop into a cold, blisteringly mean-spirited, and ultimately brutal adolescent.

The narrator, his mother, is rightly tormented by what happened to her family -- to the boy himself, to her, her beloved husband and second child -- as a result of his very existence.

She speaks as a broken women, bereft of everything that had meaning to her; a lonely, desolate, but questioning and articulate narrator who sifts through 16 years of ongoing disaster that includes everything from a shrew in the garbage disposal to the ruination of a strong, good marriage, at the hands of a skinny-eyed boy who is obsessed with school murderers past and present.

There are some things that simply don't make sense to me. For instance, that a woman as intelligent and wise as this narrator; someone who sees this sneaky, cruel, manipulative, evil, deceitful child for what he is, didn't seek immediate psychological attention for herself. And what possessed her to let her husband give him WEAPONS as gifts?

Second, given "Kev's" merciless coup de grace at the end of the book, I am not at all convinced that her subsequent behavior is either plausible or possible. The ending brought me up short and left me annoyed, as in, "am I supposed to BELIEVE this?

The book, which is so well-written and empathetic, is a window into the possible life of the parents of the children who commit these unspeakable crimes, and for that I thank the author. In this respect she had done a wonderful job of making the mother "live" for us.

The father is inscrutable, however, and despite the narrators great love for him, there's a "DUH" here that will not go away.

Throughout the book, the author has narrator torture herself about whether her "refrigerator mom" style of rearing this changeling "caused" him to be who he is.

In the end, she more or less "breaks through" to him, even planning to keep a bedroom warm for him when he gets out of prison after a few years. She'd better sleep with a machete.

"Kevin" has every earmark of a psychopath from birth to arrest. The book's notion that a bit of "cold mothering" as a cause for the creation of a psychopath is, as far as I know, purty far off the mark. Besides, his mother tries desperately to raise him with affection and attention, which he rejects and mocks at every turn, and Dad adores the little dissembling little creep. And he IS a creep. At no point do we doubt the mother's perception or take her side over dad's.

The idea that a few months in jail could produce an epiphany in this boy, much less an epiphany that would permit him to live among other human beings is so doubtful that it seems nor more than a device used to quickly tie-up a complex and disturbing narrative. I do not like the ending of this book and think it cheats the reader of a conclusion as meaningful and true as the rest of the story.

That said, I couldn't put it down.

This is the best book I've read in a long time. To be honest, I'm not literary enough to comment on the book's strengths. But I did want to comment on some of the criticisms in the Amazon reviews. Namely, that (1) the book is a novel, NOT a dissertation on teen mass murderers and (2) an unlikeable protagonist does not automatically mean the book isn't any good. Eva's failings are part of what makes the story so haunting.

I agree, that it distracted from the realism of the story that Kevin's problems were not addressed more aggressively by his parents, but his mother's negative, judgemental version of events had the benefit of hindsight. There really aren't that many SPECIFIC instances of obviously deviant behavior (although there are some). And in one case, Kevin is vindicated and his mother is shown to have judged him too harshly.

I had to read this book for my A level English literature course and at first I was apprehensive as the first few pages weren't inspiring. And I'd say the first third of the book is pretty week, but I struggled through that first section and I am truly glad I did. The second two thirds were a true piece of literary genius. I love it and everyone else I know who has read it feels the same. The second half is very thought provoking and I found myself thinking about the book and it's interpretations long after I finished reading a chapter or two. Whether I'll ever reread I'm not sure as I think the impact this has the first time you read can't be repeated but I really would recommend as the second half is so moving and inspirational. I actually chose to write my coursework on, along with most of class, because we felt there was so much to say about it - This is one book you need to read yourself as to just describe it like some of these reviews doesn't do it justice.

I'd say just persevere as the first half is rather self indulgent but it does pave the way for the second half as you aren't expecting how drastically the book changes!!

I absolutely adored this book. It isn't particularly believable, but it's fiction. It's a scary sad story about a bunch of messed up people that seem to take everything to the extreme. I'm surprised so many people seem to empathize with Eva, for the most part I thought she was still trying to justify herself to Franklin, even though she claimed to be completely honest and forthcoming with a few secrets throughout the letters. Perhaps the author was trying to convey that not much had really changed. Throughout the whole book, I found myself just wishing she'd quit being so stubborn and give poor Kevin a chance. I do not buy that he was a bad egg for a second, and I don't think that's what the author was trying to convey either.

SPOILER: Kevin is a slightly morbid child, but he doesn't really do anything that bad until the teenage years. Yeah he possibly told a little girl to scratch her eczema at 6, or squirted ink all over his moms maps, but really? None of that seemed all that scary to me, certainly not enough to earn so much scorn from his mother. It seemed like things that normal children do, like ripping wings off an insect, and instead of sitting him down and talking to him about why it was wrong, dad swoops in and says it's "normal" and drops it, and mom seems to prefer to say nothing and let it justify her apathy toward her own child. I believed he had the issues with potty training for so long because he possibly just wanted to be close to his mother, if not anger her at the same time. By the end of the book it's apparent that Eva has misjudged him more than once, from not believing him about the overpass incident to the stolen photograph she thought he just tore to shreds. Kevin loved her very dearly, but his being a difficult baby drove her to completely shut him out and play the victim, leading him to commit the ultimate atrocity as a means to get her attention, and possibly take the only things she loves away so he is all there is left.

You can see he cares for her when she finds his computer virus collection. He shows his protective side by saying if she has a problem with anyone to let him know. She took an interest in who he was, and he responded positively, then she makes some smart ass remark about "bonding" and walks out.

While I did anticipate the ending, I still found it heartbreaking. Kevin's whole life was spent trying not to let on just how much he really wanted his mothers love, just as his mother was trying so hard not to let on that there was no love to be had.

I think a lot of readers have a hard time accepting that the narrator is not always credible, but that's what I loved so much about this book. It is written rather pretentiously, but considering just how self important Eva is, I would completely believe that this is how she would write a letter to anyone, fully explaining to the reader--and herself--exactly what happened, because how she see's it is how it *really* is, as far as she is concerned.

Like I said, the story isn't believable, which puts a lot of readers off, but if I wanted to read something believable I'd read nonfiction. I highly recommend this book!

This extraordinarily intense and thought-provoking book takes the form of letters written by the mother of a school shooter to her absent husband. Eva is essentially reliving her entire history with her son in order to come to some kind of understanding as to why he decided to shoot down his classmates in cold blood. And especially, to understand the part she might have played in creating such a monster.

The writing style seems strange, more like a doctoral thesis in English Lit rather than informal letters to a person one knows very well. It put me off a bit at first - who writes letters like that? It wasn't believable. But once I got further into the book and recognized Shriver's expertise with language, I knew it wasn't likely that she would make such an obvious error. I began to wonder if there wasn't a mysterious reason for the strangeness of the letters. That's all I'm going to say about it, except: don't give up on this book because of that.

Speaking of writing style, the immense vocabulary is one of the first things you'll notice. I've read so many books that I rarely encounter an English word I don't know, but in We Need to Talk About Kevin it happened all the time. You'll want to keep a dictionary handy in order to avoid frustration. Reading it on my Kindle was a great way to experience this book, thanks to the instant-access definitions. But there were words that even the Kindle dictionary didn't know, necessitating several detours to the computer. I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of stretching my vocabulary even after so many decades of reading, so for me that was a plus.

I was thrilled to catch Shriver making a vocabulary error, though, a malapropism (a word I learned in this book): she used "pneumonic" instead of "mnemonic." Although it's probably an error on the the part of whoever transcribed the book for Kindle . . .

I didn't like the narrator at all throughout most of the book, nor did I find her entirely believable. Her self-centeredness seemed too extreme and unyielding to be real. But she and the story were so interesting that it didn't matter. And in the end, I did come to feel some compassion and credulity towards her. As with nearly all aspects of this book - and that is its genius - I go around and around about Kevin's mother. No mother could be so utterly cold and unfeeling towards her own newborn child. Yes, but . . . her feelings read exactly like accounts I've read from real parents of autistic children. Yes, but . . . those parents don't feel that way immediately, only after being subjected to behaviors that feel like dislike and rejection from the child. So maybe . . . she is a sociopath like her son, just a non-violent one. Sociopathy does run in families, after all. Yes, but . . . she does love her daughter. Yes, but . . . maybe hers is just a milder case. Maybe, but . . . if she was capable of any love at all, how could a mother dislike an innocent newborn? No wonder Kevin turned out the way he did. Yes, but . . .

Even though Kevin was an even more extreme character, I found him all too believable. We may question how a very young child could be so truly evil, but I've read accounts of real-life children exactly like him. And like the Columbine shooters Harris and Klebold, Kevin was neither a social outcast (except by choice) nor was he singled out as a victim for bullying.

We know from the beginning what Kevin ended up doing, yet there was still so much suspense in this book that I read it faster than I'd ever have thought possible for such a long book. And there were surprises all the way through to the end.

One thing that puzzled me was Eva's signatures on the letters. They look very crude, like someone trying to write with something not designed for writing, or maybe scratching letters into a wood surface. I'd expect someone like Eva - a highly educated perfectionist whose career is in writing and publishing books - to have beautiful, perfect handwriting. But that anomaly was never explained - did I miss something?

We Need to Talk About Kevin is ultimately a vastly deep and wide-ranging investigation into the questions of what makes a school shooter, and why have school shootings become so "trendy" in the last couple of decades? Although this is fiction, we aren't given any easy answers - or any answers at all; just a great many possibilities and potential contributing factors. The book raises questions rather than giving answers. Just like real life. In the end, it is disturbingly real.

(500 pages)


Quotes from We Need to Talk About Kevin:

"I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe."

"I have to go further back. So many stories are determined before they start."

"Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon - the smallest of compromises, the little roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering."

"Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, although it's not as pretty."

"You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good."

"I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to "I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, "I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important."

"And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything."

"But the resilience of the spirit is appalling."

"You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her."

"'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours."

"Surely it makes a travesty of the exercise to forgive the unrepentant."

(Referring to forgiveness) " . . . invoking a God . . . while sweepingly acquitting my shortcomings as a mother . . . made this deliverance . . . seem cheap, and an undercurrent of preening betrayed that conspicuous clemency has become the religious version of driving a flashy car. By contrast, my brother Giles' staunch incapacity to pardon us . . . is a grudge I treasure, if only for its frankness."

"it may grate on me most that this big dumb absolution latterly in vogue is doled out so selectively. Weak characters of an everyday sort - bigots, sexists, and panty fetishists - need not apply. . . . [T]he murderer harvests sheaves of pitying pen pals; an addled drama teacher too desperate to be liked is blackballed for the rest of her life."