We Need To Talk About Kevin

[SleepingStandingUp]

Just finished it. I called the twist but still thought out was brilliantly done.

So who was really to blame?

I read it 10+ years ago but it’s never left me. The Mum, I think. And she knew it.

I dunno Kevin is kind of a creep.
Society, is it societies fault?

Poor little sister.
I think he was trying to win his moms... something.

Severe PND, I blame the hubby

"So who was really to blame"

I can't believe that's a question unless I missed something major.

Kevin is to blame. I could be misremembering but up to the fateful day, was there anything concrete that his parents could have reported to the police?

How can anyone blame the mum?! Why?

I think parental blame is in terms of how Kevin turned out rather than not alerting the authorities for it per se.
There were clearly warning signs of him being not right but was that nature or nurture?

I think the persistent question is, if Eva had loved and wanted him from the start, as she did Celia, would he have turned out the way he did?

She gets pregnant for the "wrong" reasons and resents Kevin from before he's born. But does she dislike him because he's inherently dislikeable or because she is selfish? Or is she just really really unlucky?

I was reading the start thinking how can a new baby be so inherently dislikable? She had 4 or so months off with him alone, is that long enough with severe PND tp mould him into the child that could scare away so many nannies?

I read this book a long time ago. I didn't see the twist coming at all. It's a brilliantly written, horrifically affecting book that I can barely being myself to look at in shops even now! I do recommend it to people though. I'm undecided who is to blame. I feel the mum and the dad both play a part in how he turns out. That poor little girl though

I think that one of the points of the book is that the reader cannot know ( and neither can the mother), if Kevin was unlovable or if he was like he was because his mother couldn't love him. Terrific book, I'm another who read it years ago but still find myself pondering this question. The book actually made me question why I don't like some people. Is it something in me or in them?

And well done OP, I so didn't get the twist at the end. It was one of those gasp out loud moments

I went to hear Lionel Shriver talk about this book and she said she wrote it to justify her own reasons for not wanting to have children

I felt the letters were something you wrote to a dead and she clearly didn't have Celia with her but I liked the attempt to suggest custody bake and divorce mid way, it confused me and I assumed I'd been wrong but I reasserted my original theory late on.

Has anyone read Jodie Picoults 19 seconds? It's a very different take on the high school massacre story.

I assume all the shootings she listed were real, how scary is that? You now only hear about the huge ones like Columbine

The other issue is that, given Eva is our narrator, we can never really tell how skewed our perspective is. Was Franklin actually a perfectly normal dad who saw Kevin more clearly than she did, or a total dupe?

It's a brilliant way to illustrate the idea that when we get pregnant we could very well be inviting utter disaster into our lives.

I think it's absolutely 100% crystal clear that Kevin is to blame for Kevin.

but then I would never look at the teen perpetrator of a crime and blame the parents. If something came to light - that they brainwashed them since they were 2 and got them to watch mass shooting videos and celebrate them - okay. But otherwise, no.

I think it's absolutely 100% crystal clear that Kevin is to blame for Kevin.

Is he just "born bad", though? Or does he become bad because his mother has never liked him? The text also shows us that Eva can be wrong about Kevin (e.g. the rocks-off-an-overpass incident).

One of the most significant things that Eva misses completely until after the incident is that Kevin loves her and is desperate for her approval, and that in some ways he kills Franklin and Celia so he can have her to himself. If she is so blind to that, can we trust her view of Kevin at all?

Yeah his response when he realised if they divorced he'd get Dad, when the person he actually wanted was Mom.
Its like wheb he was talking about her being kinda harsh as a person, its like he modelled himself on that perception. Everything she hated about America, he wasn't any of those things and still she didn't love him

I hated that book.

Prima do you mean style, quality of writing, believability or just subject matter?

Agree about the unreliable narrator. Also that it's basically a paen to a child free existence, and not a very nice one at that just because it is so loveless and so soulless. She's not at all a convincing character for that reason - Shriver's motivation behind creating her can be seen quite clearly.

And yet she really loves Celi so not childless so much as the right one? The right reason?

Oh and sensationalist. Fine if you want to write a book exploring attitudes to motherhood, the deification of it, the paths that women are led down etc. But fgs there must be a way to explore this without ramming what Kevin gets up to in there.

Her professed love for Celi didn't ring true either for me though - she was essentially needy.

I read it when my DD was about 6 months old and I was glad I didn't read it when I was thinking about having children as it would have put me off!

I never thought of it as being a child free kind of book but now that I've read about the author it kind of adds up.

I read this a few years ago and it's stayed with me.

'There is no point, that's the point.' He killed them because he could and because he wanted Eva to himself. His sister stood no chance from the moment she was born, he held his father in utter contempt.

When she declared she wanted a new baby I did think a little wtf. I mean she refused to get a puppy but had a baby? I guess she thought a baby would be easier to protect?