We Need to Talk about Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

Book Overview

"Impossible to put down. . . . Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do." -- Boston Globe

Acclaimed author Lionel Shriver's gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry

Shriver's resonant story of a mother's unsettling quest to understand her teenage son's deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them reverberates with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006112429X
• ISBN13: 9780061124297
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Could not put it down!

I have never seen the movie and decided to read the book so I have no pre conceived expectations. This book is absolutely fantastic. At first, I hated the mother. I thought she was pretentious and sort of a mean girl. Which, she still is but I ended up liking her in the end. The subject matter is one we are all too familiar with. It really puts the question in the forefront : are sociopaths born or created?

The new children's hour

Between the dark and the daylight, When night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the children's hour. A whisper and then a silence, Yet I know by their merry eyes They are plotting and planning together To take me by surprise. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Children's Hour" School shooters were the menace of the late `90s, holding adults in their sweaty little grip for nearly a decade. In 1996, a teacher and two students were killed in Moses Lake, Washington. In 1997, a thirteen-year-old student shot a classmate over $40. That same year, Evan Ramsey killed a student and the principal of his school in Bethel, Alaska; Luke Woodham killed three classmates, wounded seven, and stabbed his mother to death in Pearl, Mississippi; and 14-year-old Michael Carneal shot up a Paducah, Kentucky school prayer group, killing three. In 1998, the juvenile shooters became more brazen. That spring, a 13-year-old partnered with an 11-year-old in Jonesboro, Arkansas to kill five and wound ten. A month later, Andrew Wurst killed a teacher in Edinboro, Pennsylvania and, in Springfield, Oregon, Kip Kinkel upped the ante by murdering his parents as well. The epidemic seemed to culminate in 1999, when 12 were killed and 24 injured at Columbine High School in suburban Denver. The counter-epidemic was no less predictable and no less morosely enthralling as the country scrambled frantically to understand why. In the wake of the Columbine murders, the victims' families filed lawsuits against the police, the school district, AOL Time Warner, Palm Pictures, Sony Entertainment, and the parents of the perpetrators. Blame for the murders was widely scattered and carelessly aimed. Video games, movies, rock music, godlessness, gun control, and working mothers were all discarded before cliques and adolescent bullying were uneasily adopted to explain this spate of children spinning violently out of control. In 2003 (still two years before 16-year-old Jeffrey Weise would kill seven people in Red Lake, Minnesota), Lionel Shriver tackled the question fictitiously in We Need to Talk About Kevin (Perseus Books). In a series of letters to her husband, Eva Khatchadourian sorts through her son's childhood and her own reluctance about motherhood in an effort to understand what drove Kevin to murder nine of his classmates on the eve of his 16th birthday. Granted, the epistolary artifice is forced and Shriver (who proudly describes herself as a pedant) is a verbal show-off, telling the story in languorous, unnecessarily complex sentences. But Kevin is still a brilliant tragicomic satire of child-centered families in the `90s, raising the possibility that we're allowing these little beasts to run wild in the name of building their "self-esteem." Eva is a casualty of child-centeredness. She reluctantly scales back her career in publishing travel guides to have a child she isn't sure she wants and, from birth, she ascribes ma

Gets into your head

This book had my rapt attention for a weekend. I could not stop reading. While seeming a bit pretentious at first, the prose is consistent, sometimes beautiful, and definitely a part of the person we come to know as Eva Katchadourian. Once I became used to her style, it did not bother me; I understood it was Eva, not Lionel Shriver. The characterization in this novel is excellent, particularly that of Eva. She is possibly the most complete character I've ever read. I was annoyed at her at times, and even bewildered at her reactions to certain situations. However, I always found Eva to be a sympathetic character. She makes many mistakes (and so did Franklin, her husband...he sometimes exhasperated me so much I wanted to throw the book!), which she admits to. Eva villifies Kevin when he is just an infant, which forms an ever-growing wedge between herself and Franklin. At the same time, it seems that she did what most normal, flawed people would do in her situation. Her letters let us know how much she loves Franklin still, despite the way he seemed to turn against her sometimes due to their disagreements about Kevin (Franklin never really accepts that Kevin could be the sociopath Eva suspects him to be). Eva's story is disturbing, harrowing, and gripping. It is hard to forget...it does not just go away when you put the book down. This book affected me in a way that no book has before. It made me question whether I ever want to have a child. It gave me a nightmare. It even made me feel trepidatious about going back to the schools (I am a substitute teacher). It even, as another reviewer put it, "left a dent in my heart." I am glad to have experienced such a well-written, moving story, but at the same time, this story left me with a sense of sadness, melancholy, and anxiety that I suspect will have a grip on me for a few days. Do not pick this up for light reading. If you want to become absorbed in a story that is important, timely, provocative, and emotionally gripping, please give this book a chance.

A Brilliant And Sensitive Psychological Study- A Great Novel

"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a disquieting, provocative, and brilliantly written novel about a mother, desperately attempting to understand why her son, 15-year-old Kevin, brutally, with premeditation, murdered seven of his fellow classmates, a cafeteria worker and his English teacher in a Columbine-style school massacre. There have been nationwide discussions on the cause of events like these - especially during the 1990s when it seemed like school shootings ran rampant throughout the US. In Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, Littleton, seemingly normal kids, kids who had almost everything a child could want, became terribly derailed. Some argue that the proliferation of and easy access to guns is the cause; others that the excess of violence in movies, TV programs and video games induce violent behavior in children and adolescents. The one question almost everyone seems to have in common is, "What were these murderous kids' parents like?" "Didn't they recognize symptoms of violence in their own children?" Eva Khatchadourian, Kevin's bereft mother, narrates this novel through a series of compelling letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. She examines her son's life, from conception to his terrible act of violence, trying to understand the why of it. What becomes clear early on is that Eva tortures herself with blame. She is guilt-ridden that her shortcomings as a parent might have caused Kevin's evil act, his violent behavior, his very nature. She must have failed, she must have been deficient as a mother, for her boy to commit such a chilling crime. She also considers that neither nature nor nurture are solely responsible for shaping a child's character. Her honest, introspective correspondence to her beloved husband causes the reader to consider that some children just might be born bad. How and when are psychopaths created? The reader is pulled back and forth between empathy and blame, anger and grief, and perhaps, ultimately to forgiveness. Through Eva's perspective we watch a story unfold. A happy, almost idyllic marriage to Franklin; a brilliant career in a business which she, herself, created; her ambivalent feelings when she became pregnant, an event which interfered with her career; the indifference she felt when she held her son for the first time; Kevin's difficult infancy - he refused his mother's milk and didn't like to be held by her; his total manipulation of his father, who believed Kevin could do no wrong, putting a permanent strain on the marriage; Kevin's lack of empathy and cruel streak, which he blatantly flaunted in front of his mother and hid from his Dad; and Eva's fear that her dislike for her son, which she went overboard to conceal, would damage him - further escalating his already violent nature. "We Need To Talk About Kevin" examines how a heinous event can impact a town, a marriage, a family and an individual. It also causes the reader to reflect on the concept of unconditional love. Lionel Shriver's clear, cr

Born Bad?

Shriver's brilliant novel explores the depth of a couple's journey into parenthood through letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her husband. Such a limited form could prove tiresome in lesser hands, but Shriver excells by giving life to Eva in uncompromisingly full dimension, revealing her faults and virtues in full measure. While the themes of reluctant motherhood and high school mass murder and their possible relationship are central to the plot and handled masterfully, the author has a rare gift of understanding of the inner self that literally puts the reader inside Eva's mind.This level of insight extends to illuminate the dark side in the person of Eva's son Kevin while at the same time offering no easy explanation of what may have contributed decisively to the creation of his utterly evil persona. There are many layers in Shriver's writing and each sentence is packed tightly with content and resonant truth. So compelling are the moment to moment revelations that one is temporarily suspended from the story. But when things really heat up in the last third of the book it becomes impossible to put it down.One of the finest writers I've come across.