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We Need To Talk About Kevin - will be reviewed on Page Turners BBC1 Friday 9.15 am

2 replies

JoolsToo · 04/04/2005 10:13

I think this is a new programme - haven't seen it before anyway, fronted by Jeremy Vine. Friday's programme includes We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - looks like a good read:

From Publishers Weekly
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful. Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.

OP posts:
sparkdiamond · 24/04/2005 10:42

Just started reading this - only about a 1/4 in but it's shaping up really well and is very intelligently written. It's the sort of book you want to curl up with uniterupted - if only we could with kids!

spacedonkey · 24/04/2005 17:26

I saw the review of this on page turners, and now I really want to read it. Great programme but it irks me that Jeremy Vine always SHOUTS

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