Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - We Need To Talk About Kevin

It's an excellent technical display of unlikeable characters and an unreliable narrator, but ultimately there was nothing redeeming about this book that made me glad to have read it.

Content Warnings

kstericker's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

waitforhightide's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I bought this book on a Book Date with my spouse and was excited to read it. I had stumbled upon the movie on Netflix several years ago, and while I've relaxed my I MUST READ THE BOOK FIRST policy, I do like to go back and read source material for movies.

For reference, the movie really affected me, and I had a lot of emotions watching it, as a childless white person who is afraid of being pregnant or having children; and also as a millennial who has lived during the school shooting era.

the remainder of this review is under spoiler text below, with spoilers and references to both the book and the movie.

While the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin is intriguing, leaving the viewer (or at least leaving me) wondering how much of Eva's experiences were because of Kevin's behavior and how much was her emotional reaction to being a reluctant mother with a challenging child, I really felt that the parts that were just in the novel and not the film adaptation soured the story for me. I found Eva as a narrator pretentious to a fault, and dripping with privilege in a way that she (and the author?) somehow manages to acknowledge and do absolutely nothing about at the same time. Where the movie left me sympathetic to her, almost everything in the book--from being a self-proclaimed liberal person living with a staunch Republican and never seeming to see this as an issue, to being a woman with wealth but never seeking psychiatric help for her children, or even attempting--left me annoyed.

I think I would have given this book another quarter or half star if the interview with the author pages afterwards were not written in almost exactly the same tone of voice, implying to me that Lionel Shriver is writing a somewhat dark and speculative piece of fiction without ever once bothering to deviate from her own high class, borderline-academic, high-brow writing style. I may have seen Eva as a sharp-edged and uncomfortable critique on what the upper-middle-class suburban parent contributes to the psychology of their sons as school shooters if I was even once able to distinguish Shriver's personal voice from Eva's narration.

That said, I could not, and I was left frustrated and annoyed with a book that pointed out so many flaws, both personal and systemic, in the story, and managed to grow from, reflect on, or even truly empathize with almost none of them.

Content Warnings