We Need to Talk About Kevin
By Lionel Shriver
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061124297, 432pp.)
Publication Date: July 2006
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback, Paperback, Hardcover
Categories: Literary
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The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
LIONEL SHRIVERs novels include the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London, England, and Brooklyn, New York.
- Non-maternal, ambivalent mothers are one of the last taboos—and Eva is a prime example. Were her motives for having a baby entirely selfish? And if so, how much can that have factored into the outcome of an abnormally difficult baby and apathetic child? In contrast to Kevin, Celia was loving, needy and sweet -- and her mother's favorite, if not her father's. By the very end of the novel, has Eva's love for Kevin, or at least her primitive loyalty to him, finally become unconditional? How does this fit in with the feminist ideal of motherhood?
“Furiously imagined.”
-Seattle Times
“Ms. Shriver takes a calculated risk . . . but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy.”
-Wall Street Journal
“An underground feminist hit.”
-New York Observer
“Powerful [and] harrowing.”
-Entertainment Weekly
“Impossible to put down.”
-Boston Globe
“Shriver handles this material, with its potential for cheap sentiment and soap opera plot, with rare skill and sense.”
-Newark Star Ledger
“A slow, magnetic descent into hell that is as fascinating as it is disturbing.”
-Cleveland Plain Dealer

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