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.