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We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

This was a very hard book to read. First, the woman who narrates the story, Eva, is highly intelligent, well traveled, and not particularly likable. Second, the subject is difficult, a high school rampage is hard to read about, especially from someone who knows the killer.

Eva’s son Kevin kills seven of his classmates, a cafeteria worker and a teacher a few days before his sixteenth birthday. It is a well thought out and executed act. Not because Kevin was picked on or ostracized, if anything he did that to other children.

The book is a series of letters that Eva writes to her estranged husband, Franklin. She doesn’t sugar coat anything, all her thoughts and feelings are out there for Franklin to hear.

Starting with the fact that Eva never really wanted to be a mother, she loved the life that she and Franklin had and didn’t feel the need to have children. Franklin felt differently and so they had Kevin.

From the beginning Eva felt nothing for this tiny little person, and as he grew, things didn’t change, if anything it was worse. Eva saw Kevin as a master manipulator, Franklin thought he was just a boy and Eva was too hard on him. In Eva’s letters she tries to point out where they went wrong, but also that this was a part of who Kevin was from birth.

Through out the book it becomes clear that Eva wonders if the relationship she has with Kevin is why he did what he did. Eva looks at herself as a mother and finds that she is lacking with Kevin while she loved her daughter Celia unconditionally.

This book raises the question, nature or nurture? Was Kevin missing a part of his personality that allowed him to feel empathy for others, or was he raised that way?

How much responsibility belongs to a parent when her child does something horrific? And how long do you punish yourself? How do you again become part of the community when your child has taken so much away from it?

I enjoyed this book, even though it was difficult to read. There are still a few surprises Kevin can throw at you, even after he kills his classmates.