We need to talk about Kevin is a cautionary tale about motherhood and should be read before one decides to take the big step. If you have a child and you don’t want to, he/she might become a mass murderer so better mind your own business and stay childless. I am joking but the novel doesn’t.We need to talk about Kevin was painful to read/listen to. It felt like with every sentence that I was advancing through a mass of skewers that were poking my brain and heart. However, I could not stop listen...

Overwritten. Arduous. Boring.Seeing as We Need to Talk About Kevin is famous for being such a gritty, disturbing read, I always expected to love it in a sick, twisted kind of way. Unfortunately, it is not what I expected at all. I had to force myself through one overstuffed sentence after another, only to be left feeling drained and dissatisfied.I knew I was in for a paint-dryingly slow read almost immediately. Every sentence is padded out with big words and details that are clearly there to imp...

A novel that's elegant & overly articulate--yet VERY readable. So much dexterity is on display here ("Damn what an amazing writer!" is a perpetual thought while reading this), with a prose made by some wizard's alchemy, a talent-filled intuition, & a distinct view that's brutal & uncomfortably honest. Shriver outshines even Flaubert himself: THIS is the very core of feminism, of individualism (move over Madame Bovary... you cared more for the idea of love than anything else, anyway, ...

---Immediate reaction after reading---I’m so horrified that I feel sick, and I’m nearly crying, not because of Kevin but for Kevin, and I don’t know who to blame anymore, or what to feel, or what to think. I only know that this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read, and in all likelihood, will ever read.How can I so deeply love a book that is this agonisingly ugly??---Full review---I knew before I started that reading this was going to be hard. We Need to Talk about Kevin is listed as one of th...

I am a little apprehensive as to how I should begin this review: there are so many things to talk about.First of all, I consider this to be truly a great work of literature, not simply "fiction". As a great writer of my native language said: "The real story is on the unwritten pages"; that is, it is the gaps, the pauses and the undercurrents between the characters (which the reader is forced to complete or imagine) which is the mark of great literature. This is one hundred percent correct as far...

At first, this book seems to be about a mass-murdering Columbine-style kid and whether or not he was born that way or his mother, who didn't love him, made him that way. Nature v nurture. Old.Or perhaps it's the lonely ramblings of a woman who has nothing left except guilt, and it's only guilt and anything that feeds it that sustains her. Like a drug addict she gets her fix from visiting her son, then the rush, the letters, free-flowing words, all the guilt tumbling almost joyously out, no detai...

I did not like this book. Honestly, what was to like about it? The topic is horrifying, the characters are hateful (and not just the characters that commit mass murders) and the writing style is the worst of all. From the first page I was SO irritated by the writing. I'll bet that the first purchase Ms. Shriver made after finding a publisher for this book was a new thesaurus. I'm positive that hers was absolutely worn out. It was like, "Hi! Let's see how fancy we can sound!" Especially for a boo...

Some readers really don't like this book and I'm not entirely sure why.Maybe it's because I'm not a mother and I did find it believable that Eva doesn't love her son completely. Maybe it's because I enjoy the big words that were used in the letters and found it believable that she would write this way.Maybe I'm a sucker for good endings and this one ended with a bang.I think the writing was superb and despite it being a hard book to read (the incident with the maps was particularly brutal), it w...

This book is just devastating ... and devastatingly good. I've just finished it, and had a little cry on the balcony in the bright sunshine, thinking about my mom and motherhood and blame, self-recrimination, guilt and remorse and parental love and the painfully ambiguous, sometimes tortured complexity of it all.And that is underselling it.Suffice for now to say, you might not enjoy this if:- You believe that a lack of maternal instinct or feeling is a character flaw or a moral failing;- You com...

The pull-quote on the cover of the edition I read suggests that it's impossible to put this book down. That's almost entirely false. Out of the book's 400 pages, the first 300 were kind of like pulling teeth. Creepy, maternal teeth. The last 100 pages, however, were actually and physically impossible to look away from, and the brisk pace of the climax, after so. many. pages. of buildup, actually created a really wonderful, complete story that was very satisfying and which (god help me) made me c...