We Need to Talk About Kevin

Haunting. Disturbing. Probably the most unsettling book i've ever read. I would strongly recommend it and am unsure if expecting parents should avoid it or read it ASAP.

I loved that all of characters were deeply flawed, but realistic. You could spend ages dissecting their family dynamic. The book poses a lot of questions: Are parents responsible for their children's horrible actions? Can someone be a good parent even if they don't love their child? Why do some teenagers decide to commit atrocities, and are some people just born evil? There is SO much to unpack, and the themes are just as relevant in 2019 as they were in 2003.

My only issues were that the vocabulary was unnecessarily difficult at times and the first few chapters are slow, but later chapters are more digestible and the story progresses quickly once Kevin is born.

I do wonder if this was a deliberate choice, as the story is told from Eva's perspective, and her pretentiousness/ego is broken down over time.

There were aspects of this book that hooked me, but I was irritated almost the entire time I was reading it. Here's why:

• It's not big on sympathetic characters: the son is a sociopath, the mom needs a spine, and the dad is a chauvinistic douche.

• The author - in an attempt to create tension, I suppose - lets you know out of the gates that there was a horrific school shooting, but then backtracks to tell the life of the mother before the shooter was even born. While I get that she's trying to share the backstory that led to the events, it felt like the equivalent of having your aunt say, "Did you know your 15 year old cousin is pregnant by her geometry teacher?" then proceeding to tell you about everyone's "kinfolk." Sorry, but it's just bad story telling to string someone along with backstory when you've trotted out something that has more immediate questions that need to get answered.

I'd started this book once before and shelved it. This time I persevered, and though I completed it, I found myself wondering why I'd wasted time on it twice.

This was another book group book for me. I never would have picked this one up otherwise. Certainly wouldn't have made it past the first few pages. I guess I don't understand what there is to get out of reading books like this. Yes, there are horrible people in the world, but once I know this and have a reasonable understanding of psychopaths (see the Psychopath Test for a much better book about psychopaths), why exactly do I need to read this?

But starting with the writing. The letter to Franklin format got tiresome really fast. It kind of worked in the 2nd half when the paceing picked up but I ended up reading just a few sentences on each page to get through the first half. It was just pages of florid but irrelevant details. I don't feel like I missed anything by skipping so much. And I just really wanted to get through it so I didn't have to spend anymore time with them.

None of it is really surprising. Kevin tortures his classmates/parents/everybody in ever increasing ways. We already know pretty soon in the book that he kills a lot of them in the end. There is a slight reveal at the end which is sort of surprising, but not really that much. It is a character progression of a sort but really, not at all.

Here we have a first book (why are so many first books about IMPORTANT topics like the Holocaust, mass killings, etc?) about an awful person, that we know in the beginning where it is going, that doesn't really go anywhere in the meantime, with a letter format retrospectively giving the whole book a sterile contemplative distance from the horror of the events. Why did I read this book? I'm not really sure but I'm glad I can now set it aside and never engage with it again.