Macabre massacres
Once again I'm chiding myself for not getting my reviews up in a timely manner. Then I remind myself that it's not as if anyone is actually reading these anyway, and then I feel better.
My latest review, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin, is a recommendation from my mom, who read it for her book club. She enjoyed the book a lot, but allowed as how it's not the best choice for a book club where not all the participants finish the book before the meeting. She's right in her assessment that your opinion of the various characters shifts rather dramatically through the course of the book, right up until the very end.
The novel is framed as a series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her estranged husband, Franklin. Two years before the novel opens, Eva and Franklin's son Kevin killed nine people at his high school and is currently serving time in a juvenile detention facility. Eva struggles to cope with the aftermath of "Thursday," as she refers to it, and uses her letters as a way to put all her socially uncensored feelings to paper. Not surprisingly, Eva feels responsible for Kevin's actions and guilty about her own role in Kevin's disaffection. Getting no answers from her bitter, cynical son, Eva retraces her life in an effort to understand how it all went so wrong.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a tough book to read because it strips away all the happy societal whitewash we paint over motherhood and family. In some ways it's really rather depressing to think that it's possible that our love for those near and dear to us may be an affection on some level - a fiction we create because we know society expects us to love them. That said, there's something meaningful in that level of candor, that ability to embrace the less socially acceptable feelings we all have. In another writer's hands Shriver's subject could easily become a Hollywood schlock-fest, but in hers it's a deeply insightful portrait of what we all try to ignore in ourselves.
Definitely a worthwhile read and a great choice to discuss in a book club (but only if everyone promises on their mothers to finish it before the meeting).
My latest review, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin, is a recommendation from my mom, who read it for her book club. She enjoyed the book a lot, but allowed as how it's not the best choice for a book club where not all the participants finish the book before the meeting. She's right in her assessment that your opinion of the various characters shifts rather dramatically through the course of the book, right up until the very end.
The novel is framed as a series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her estranged husband, Franklin. Two years before the novel opens, Eva and Franklin's son Kevin killed nine people at his high school and is currently serving time in a juvenile detention facility. Eva struggles to cope with the aftermath of "Thursday," as she refers to it, and uses her letters as a way to put all her socially uncensored feelings to paper. Not surprisingly, Eva feels responsible for Kevin's actions and guilty about her own role in Kevin's disaffection. Getting no answers from her bitter, cynical son, Eva retraces her life in an effort to understand how it all went so wrong.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a tough book to read because it strips away all the happy societal whitewash we paint over motherhood and family. In some ways it's really rather depressing to think that it's possible that our love for those near and dear to us may be an affection on some level - a fiction we create because we know society expects us to love them. That said, there's something meaningful in that level of candor, that ability to embrace the less socially acceptable feelings we all have. In another writer's hands Shriver's subject could easily become a Hollywood schlock-fest, but in hers it's a deeply insightful portrait of what we all try to ignore in ourselves.
Definitely a worthwhile read and a great choice to discuss in a book club (but only if everyone promises on their mothers to finish it before the meeting).
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