That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child’s character is self-evident. But generalizations about genes are likely to provide cold comfort if it’s your own child who just opened fire on his feellow algebra students and whose class photograph—with its unseemly grin—is shown on the evening news coast-to-coast.
If the question of who’s to blame for teenage atrocity … teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.
In relating the story of Kevin’s upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged husband, Frank, through a series of startingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general—and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need To Talk About Kevin offers no at explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents—whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton—have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, career—while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.
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This is my all time favorite book, it gives such an original insight to parenting and the concept of Nature vs. Nurture.
This needs to be added to the scariest book list. I read this years ago as a suggestion from someone. One of those books you wish you hadn’t read. Took months for me to get over it. Actually I have never gotten over it. I gave it 5 stars because it is a good scary book. I read it pretty quickly. At one point, as I was reading, something …
Very topical. The survivors often suffer more.
Shriver never shies away from difficult subjects and she uses a school shooting as a backdrop to examine the tragedy from the shooters’ mothers perspective. It is powerful and intense with a sense of human desperation throughout but above all explores how a mother’s love endures regardless of the disgust she harbours for her child’s depravity.
Controversial, interesting, chilling, this has a strong hook, hard-hitting themes, and fantastic writing. The characters are pretentious and hateful, although utterly realistic, and it’s clear this is fantastic writing at work exploring themes like what makes someone a murderer? Are they born a killer or made that way? Is it nature or nurture that …
This novel broke my heart. In letters to her husband, Eva recounts their lives and the events surrounding their sons tragic undertaking. I’ve never read another author who wrote so beautifully. Every sentence a gem. One of the best novels ever written about the mother/child bond. Imperfect, messy, painful, but unbreakable.
This epistolary novel is impressively grotesque. Somewhere between Tampa and Baby Teeth, Shriver succeeds at painting a lasting portrait of a deranged young boy and his hateful mother.
We Need to Talk About Kevin follows the story of Eva Khatchadourian, who narrates the story in the form of letters to her husband, Franklin, who is evidently no …
A twitch in your stomach is the feeling left behind by this book. There is also suffocation, great sadness, and distress. It’s been a day since I finished reading it, and it still does not get out of my mind. Well, it’s annoying. The truth is that the book struck me in amazement. It is true that there are those who have depression after having a …