We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
Eva Khatchadourian is a successful travel writer and the founder of a company that publishes guidebooks. Her son, Kevin, is in a juvenile detention facility, serving a sentence for a massacre he committed at his high school just before his sixteenth birthday. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, Eva tries to understand how her son became a killer.
The novel is told through a series of letters Eva writes to her husband, Franklin, from whom she is separated. In them, she looks back over her life with Kevin, from her ambivalence about becoming a mother and her difficult pregnancy to his infancy and childhood. From the beginning, she says, Kevin seemed hostile and manipulative, at least toward her, while Franklin saw only a normal, if difficult, boy and dismissed her concerns. The birth of their gentle daughter, Celia, only sharpens the contrast.
As Eva recounts disturbing incidents from Kevin’s childhood and adolescence, readers are left to question whether she is a reliable narrator, and whether Kevin was born with a capacity for evil or shaped by a mother who never truly loved him. Meanwhile, Eva visits Kevin regularly in prison, facing the hostility of her community and the weight of her own guilt.
Shriver explores motherhood, nature versus nurture, responsibility and American culture with unflinching honesty, building toward a devastating revelation.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and adapted into a film, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a powerful, disturbing and unforgettable novel. It contains graphic violence, including a school massacre, and other distressing themes.
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