Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel by Lionel Shriver ISBN: 1-58243-267-8 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.08 (53 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Savage imagination, penetrating insight
Comment: I cadged an advance reader's copy of this novel and read it in two sittings. It's terrific--a tour de force that constitutes, to my knowledge, the first full literary treatment of the American teenage mass-murder phenomenon that culminated in the Columbine massacre in 1999. Shriver's effort will be difficult to surpass. As with a Columbo mystery, the reader is made aware of the central violent act from the outset. The intrigue, drive and substance of the novel reside in the how and why. The plot unfolds in a series of letters from the culprit's mother, Eva Khatchadourian, to her estranged husband Franklin, yet the book has none of the shortcomings--remoteness, dearth of dialogue and characters, lack of "granularity"--that tend to afflict epistolary novels. The letter format simply allows the narrator to focus her agonized reflections about what she may have done wrong as a parent directly onto her main accomplice in child-rearing. That question does not admit of a clean answer, and Shriver does not indulge in writing a ruminating novel-of-ideas on the artificially stark nature/nurture question. This book is about particular people rather than archetypes, and the way their irreducible peculiarities--Eva's sardonic remove from both family and country, Franklin's infuriating guilelessness, Kevin's willful intelligence and perhaps an inborn kernel of evil--combine with a society that is alternately too pitiless and too forgiving to produce a terrible outcome that is hell to predict. The excellence of the novel derives from the author's refusal to burden the reader with vacuous homilies or "lessons," from her illumination of the possibility of reason in apparent randomness, and from her pervasive conviction that even the horrid has the virtue of poignancy. Kevin is a dark and unsettling fellow, and We Need to Talk About Kevin is a dark and unsettling book. Yet it rewards the reader with one of the most hard-earned--and soberly redemptive--endings I've yet encountered in fiction.
Rating: 5
Summary: Terrifying and brilliant
Comment: This is one of the most chilling and compulsively readable books I've opened in a long time. As you read Eva Khatchadourian's letters to her estranged husband you think 'this is what it must be like' for parents whose child has just murdered classmates and a popular teacher.
As Eva reveals in her letters, she knew something was wrong with Kevin from the moment of his birth when he turned away from her breast snarling and screaming. The anger does not wane, even though outwardly he was a passive, disinterested child. She blames her own mixed feelings toward him, but her beloved husband Franklin fiercely defends the boy whenever she asks why babysitters never come back for a second time and other families go great lengths to keep Kevin away from their own children. And Eva doesn't like him. No matter how hard she tries--and she does try very hard, moving to the suburbs, staying home, none of which she wants to do'she does not like her son.
Since you know from the beginning that Kevin is in juvenile prison for killing his classmates, you might think that the suspense in the story will come from finding out how he planned his spree and carried it out. You would be very, very mistaken. Very late in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' Lionel Shriver introduces a twist that is completely unexpected and totally shocking. These are words too frequently used in describing thrillers which rarely deliver the unexpected or the shocking. Believe me, in this book, those words do not begin to describe the wallop Shriver packs in the last quarter of the novel.
I was unfamiliar with Lionel Shriver, and will (after a recovery period) look for her other novels. She digs fearlessly into the back of her characters' minds and the bottoms of their hearts. Read this book.
Rating: 2
Summary: Well Written But Has Loathsome Protagonist
Comment: Although this was an extremely well written book, I just could not like the protagonist, Eva Khatchadourian at all. She remains cold and indifferent to her son Kevin who was born on April 11, 1983. Her treatment of Kevin was deplorable.
Problems with Kevin are evident from the start. He insists on wearing diapers until he is six; he willfully destroys property and has no attachments to any object or person. He does not play with toys and shows no interest in initiating interactions. Why this child was not in therapy remains a mystery to me.
Eva's long suffering husband Franklin tries to take logic where it had never been with Eva. He chided her for blaming Kevin for everything that went wrong in their home and in Kevin's class; he rightfully challenged her by saying, "Evin doesn't play right, meaning the way YOU did. He doesn't treat the toys YOU make him like museum pieces. He doesn't pat YOU on the back every time he learns to spell a new word." Way to go, Franklin! I thought he was right.
I did not like Eva or her teaching methods, which I found vain and self serving. I also thought it served her right that Kevin learned to read and count and add in secret without her. Her comment about "never being treated to a 'Eureka!' moment" of witnessing the child learn something she taught sounded very self serving indeed. I also felt it right when Kevin destroyed and disposed of her handmade toys. All of her efforts hollered, "Look at how good I am. I make the effort by making him toys. I try to teach him basic skills and it turns out he already knew them." It was all about her and Kevin, as Franklin rightfully pointed out never once entered in. Her efforts were really for herself and not for Kevin.
There were several discrepancies in the book. One journal entry dated November 8, 2000 was heralded as "one year and eight months to the day" after Kevin's final acts of cruelty when in fact it was "one year and seven months to the day." Early in the book, Eva calls Franklin "Jim" and that was never explained. Eva breaks Kevin's right arm in July of 1989 after he went on a major soiling campaign and a few pages later, Kevin, still cast-bound catches a ball with his "good right hand." That was the one she broke!
Several things bothered me, including Kevin's covering for Eva when she broke his arm. When he is rushed to the hospital, he insists that Eva wait outside for him. I have never heard of any hospital that would treat a child without a parent or other responsible adult being present. I never understood why Eva, upset with Kevin for allegedly enticing a kindergarten classmate to scratch her eczema encrusted skin never questioned him or the other child directly. I was also baffled as to why the teacher did not question both children about what Kevin was whispering to the other child as she scratched herself. Why Franklin, understandably upset with Eva for accusing Kevin of "seducing" and "enticing" the other child into scratching herself never asked Kevin about the incident sounded equally remiss to me. At that time, Kevin was a kindergarten child, not Svengali! I think Eva was an atrocious parent.
I also didn't understand why neither parent asked local sitters why they refused to watch Kevin a second time or ask the neighborhood mothers why they created a play group deliberately excluding Kevin.
When Kevin's sister Celia was born in 1990, he stepped up his malicious behavior. He ties her to her booster seat and forces her to eat inedible concoctions; he binds and gags her in a game of "kidnapping." Celia was clingy and fatuously docile to a fault. Why neither parent protected her more is anybody's good guess.
When Kevin allegedly puts Celia's eye out in February of 1998, I could not understand why Eva would leave her in the same house with Kevin. I thought that was the height of dangerous negligence. I also didn't like her low expectations for the child; "Celia was a doormat" and one who could count on being exploited by the world at large.
Kevin's twisted pathology culminates in devastating acts of cruelty and violence on April 8, 1999. One can only wonder what forces shaped and created Kevin.
 |
Title: Little Children by Tom Perrotta ISBN: 0312315716 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: Family History by Dani Shapiro ISBN: 0375415475 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
 |
Title: What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel by Zoe Heller ISBN: 0805073337 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
 |
Title: My Sister's Keeper: A Novel (PICOULT, JODI) by Jodi Picoult ISBN: 0743454529 Publisher: Atria Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: The Breathtaker (Today Show Book Club #19) by Alice Blanchard ISBN: 0446531391 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
