We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

This is an amazing book! You don't stop thinking about it for days. It's a great book club book for everyone.

Here's a summary of We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver from Publishers Weekly on Amazon:
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful.

Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia.

The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale.

It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.

Originally LOLAs was going to review this book in January 2008 and so I read it in December. But after a few of us read it, we decided it was not the best holiday read so we pushed the discussion back to our April group.

Since this was before I started blogging, I don't have many comments. But here is what Julie said in her book journal - "Wow - this is quite a novel. I thought it was so well written, but I just couldn't quite give it five stars. I just couldn't bring myself to love this book because it was so gruesome. But well worth the read."

As she said, it's not a light read. But I think it's a must read for all book clubs.

Published:
Pages: 416
Series: None
Author's Website: Harper Collins
Discussion Questions: Reading Group Guide