Jul 9

Jul 9 We Need to Talk About Kevin

Author: Lionel Shriver
Publisher: Counterpoint (originally, in 2003 — the edition shown above is Harper Perennial)
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

TL;DR Review

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a deeply unsettling but ultimately brilliant book about the mother of a psychopathic kid who commits a school shooting.

For you if: You can read difficult but important books.

Full Review

We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Women's Prize in 2005, so was next up for me in the #ReadingWomen challenge to read all the previous winners this year.

Mid-review important trigger warning: School shootings

This book is narrated by a woman named Eva as she writes letters to her former husband, giving her full account of the years leading up to the day their son murdered nine classmates and a teacher. Kevin showed psychopathic tendencies from infancy, especially to his mother — but over and over again, Eva was not believed. Trapped between the expectations of what it means to be a mother, a parent's perceived responsibility for a child's actions, and a terrorizing son, she was damned if she did, damned if she didn't. Until one day, it was too late.

This book is ... deeply unsettling, and often difficult to read. But it's also an undeniably brilliant feat. Beyond just depicting Kevin's chilling nature and behaviors (this kid is CREEPY), you also find yourself wavering between believing Eva and not, and then feeling guilty for it. Even readers can't pull ourselves out of our expectations of her as his mother, the gut reaction that she's partly to blame although of course she isn't at all. I am going to be thinking about this for a really long time.

The writing — Eva's voice — feels a little stiff at first, but stick with her. I actually found that it lent itself really well to being spoken rather than read, and I did large swaths of this on audiobook. It was very well done. Sometimes I even listened (fast) while I read along in print.

This one really shook me, and if you think you're up for something uncomfortable but important, I recommend it.