We need to talk about Kevin

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We need to talk about Kevin

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1mydomino1978
Jan. 18, 2008, 5:58 pm

We need to talk about Kevin was a really good book. A mother, whose son, just before his 16th birthday kills several of his schoolmates, in a coldly premeditated way. Was he like he was because she was a poor mother, or was he born evil. Is she guilty?
The book is told in a series of letters to her husband, detailing her ambivalence as a mother, the things her son did, even as a toddler that indicated he was not normal, and how she felt about her husband always taking the sons side, never admitting he was anything other than normal. I don't want to give anything away, but I will say this book was much better than I thought it would be when I started it.
I recognized some of my own ambivalence about parenting, and the guilt all parents suffer from. This is a book I will be thinking of off and on for years, and there are darn few of that type around.

2QueenOfDenmark
Bearbeitet: Jan. 18, 2008, 6:12 pm

I agree, this book was much better than I expected it to be.

I was being a bit of a book snob to be honest though in that I had heard all the fuss about the book and didn't expect it to live up to the hype (not my fault, I developed this cynical syndrome after The Da Vinci Code).

Also, when I read that the mother was trying to work out if she was to blame for her sons actions I was expecting some sappy woman bleating on about where she went wrong and taking all the blame.

I'm glad to say this isn't what happened at all and I really took to Eva, it was the husband who really got on my nerves (I knew his name a second ago).

I ended up recommending the book to my reading group and most of them also liked it after expecting to hate it, although we all thought it made for some hard reading subject wise.

Since then I've read Double Fault (didn't get into it) and The Post Birthday World (couldn't put it down) so I will be looking out for anything else by Lionel Shriver and hope something comes out soon.