What effects do one ambivalent parent and one overly optimistic parent have on a child? Is nature or nurture to blame for creating a sociopath? What might drive a teenager to remorselessly commit murder? Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin poses these difficult questions and many more. The narrative, which leads with horrifying inevitability to the day when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Kevin's mother, Eva, to her apparently estranged husband, Franklin. This method both affords the reader deep insight into Eva's consciousness and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock at the end of the book. The novel is harrowing, psychologically astute and even darkly humourous; it proves the tenuousness between blame and empathy, retribution and forgiveness.
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