Please tell me what you liked about "We need to talk about Kevin"

[Pandoraneedsbugs]

and did you read it to the end

I didnt even make it to the end of the first letter

Yawn yawn and thrice yawn

How interesting... haven't read it but a friend who devours books says it's a must-read.

Kevin and the mother, I read into it.

I did not pick up incest either. Sakura, can you elaborate?

Well I might have been reading too much into it, but seeing as someone else mentioned incest...I found the relationship between Eva and her son a little strange. She wears that really short slit skirt or something when they go out for dinner, just her and her son. I dont know- Franklyn mentioned asked her if it was appropriate. Also there was the very very detailed (faintly disgusting) description of her wiping Kevins genitals as she changed his nappy when he was five or over. There are more but these are off the top of my head- I haven`T read it since last year.

no didn't see that at all

I loved that book.

I found it very well-written and that it dealt very deftly with issues which are very very hard to talk about, for example that not all mothers adore their children, whether people are born bad or become bad, working mothers, grief. And the ending...wow.

easily makes my list of top 5 books ever! worth making the effort to read to the end

anyone who changes their name to lionel is an attention seeking twat.

agree it is similar to time travellers wife - overrated.

I found her 'reconciliation' with her son at the end a bit surprising, jarring even. But I did not see incest in it or in the other parts. Just a guilt-ridden character who was still finding her way in how to interact with her disturbed son.

I thought this was a fantastic read. Very chilling and made me think. It's the whole nature/nurture debate. Is a child born a certain way or do they become it? Or a mixture of both.

I think it's worth reading. I think, Pandora, that perhaps you haven't actually given it much of a chance It's definitely not a 'skimming through it' kind of book as lots of what's good about it comes from the details, characterizations, subtle descriptions etc.

Basically I agree with everything dinosaurus said. The book raises lots of difficult, interesting questions. I think it's actually a perfect book group choice.

I hated it but read it quickly and was completely gripped. Had two beloved little boys in my life at the time and couldn't bear description of child as born evil. Also hated the extreme cruelty of some events, and failure to protect little sister, and found father's refusal to accept there was anything wrong incomprehensible. Guess I didn't really get the unreliable narrator thing! And the end where mother furnishes K's room with his bow and arrows to welcome him back ....!!

I felt I wanted to read it to the end, and curious about whether the child hated the mother because she didn't love him.

But I really disliked the fact that she didn't protect her little girl, the eye wash bit was awful.

And found the ending over-egged, but it was pretty good all in all.

Lucifera: it's interesting though, because couldn't it (possibly) be the case that human beings are born with some characteristics... and that in extreme cases these characteristics could be...well, extreme? I hate the word 'evil', I think it's unnecessary & wrong, so I won't use it. But I do believe that children are born with a temperament & that parents have to deal with that temperament & there's so much they can do about it. (Not that parental influence doesn't play a role too, of course it does).

In this case I think both the mother had difficulties dealing with Kevin, but Kevin too had a particular temperament.

Fascinating reading all your thoughts! - Im still not tempted to change my first impression though

oh go on pandoraneedsbugs - you can't judge the whole book by the first few pages!

Honestly, it gets better and better!

YEs the name change is pretentious but at least she went all out and changed it to a dodgy-sounding man`s name. that has a certain amount of class to it! What is really pretentious is changing your name from Sadie Smith to Zadie Smith

not bothered about the name change. i'm annoyed to realise that i'd never found her being called lionel even slightly odd - never even noticed it [unobservant twonk emoticon]. but I couldn't take Eva as a mother seriously - it read to me like a fantasy you have while pregnant - 'i'm going to be a terrible mother - i'm not even going to like my own child - i'm going to turn it into a monster' etc etc. Not very real.

i really liked her tennis book [googles; Double Fault] I thought it was excellent and i preferred it to Kevin tbh, maybe because it was a world I know so little about and which looks desirable to the external viewer. Like motherhood perhaps...?

Maria2007, yes I guess I agree that children do have their own characters at birth, although prenatal influences can affect them too, perhaps? But I really can't imagine a baby being cold and rejecting as Kevin is depicted, and anyone seeing their baby like this is mad and dreadful imo!

totally absolutely nothing, except that I am quite impressed by the writer's sense of her own significance - I'm always impressed (or more perhaps astonished) by people who have No Self Doubt whatsoever

Now I'm going to read everyone else's responses

OK, more considered response now.

I minded a lot that it was so badly written - heavy, inflated, portentous. You can write about things that matter (see, eg, Trollope) without bashing your reader round the head with the size of your sentences & the Reader's Digest-type power of your vocabulary.

I minded that it presented itself as some kind of truth-telling social document ("what REALLY goes on behind the scenes of high school atrocities") while actually being Made Up, and, even as a fictional endeavour, stupidly facile: mean mummy combined with tricky child = catastrophe. Life is much more complicated than that, and so should fiction be.

I minded that it had, and has, a cultural currency (that is to say, has been a marketing success) where it is something people feel they should read and should know about.

I do think she (see previous post) is a rather impressive phenomenon.

I loved it but as a mother it scared me!

Bink: I agree about the marketing success & the cultural currency. It's true that this book became a 'must read' book at its time. I hate that kind of thing (in a very different way 'the alchemist' by P. Coehlo became the same thing in Greece for a while- I ended up HATING hearing quotes from it).

I don't agree though that it was badly written. 'Heavy, inflated, portentous'? No, I didn't get that. I've read another book by Lionel Shriver, don't remember the name, it had to do with 2 different possible lives, with 2 different men (the changing world? or something like that). I liked that too (including the writing). I also dislike self-congratulatory kind of writing, 'oh-what-a-great-writer-I-am' kind of writing e.g. Siri Hustvedt and Julie Myerson are examples that come to mind. But really Lionel Shriver strikes me as much better than that, at least in the 2 books I've read... Maybe I should reread though, it's been years since I read it.

Nothing

bad characterisation, poorly constructed and predictable

I heard the Woman's Hour serialisation while on maternity leave with DS1 (I think it was in early 2008) and found it quite horribly compelling and disturbing. I'm now on maternity leave with a second little boy but am less concerned that one of my sons might turn out to be a Kevin. I thought it was very well done and found it quite convincing when listening - sort of surprising when I heard that the author has no children herself.