We Need to Talk About KevinWe Need to Talk About Kevin
Title rated 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 488 ratings(488 ratings)
Book, 2003
Current format, Book, 2003, , Available .eBook
Also offered as eBook, Available. Available
Eva Khatchadourian writes to her estranged husband Frank, trying to solve what went wrong in raising their son Kevin after he kills seven classmates and a teacher in his high school in upstate New York.
The mother of a teenage boy who killed seven fellow students and two adults in a high-school shooting writes a series of letters to her estranged husband on their son's upbringing and questions what she fears may be her own part in the tragedy. 50,000 first printing.
If the question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.
In relating the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged husband, Frank, through a series of startingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general - and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need To Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents - whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton - have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, and career - while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.
The mother of a teenage boy who killed seven fellow students and two adults in a high-school shooting writes a series of letters to her estranged husband on their son's upbringing and questions what she fears may be her own part in the tragedy. 50,000 first printing.
If the question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity intrigues news-watching voyeurs, it tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years before the opening of the novel, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and the much-beloved teacher who had tried to befriend him. Because his sixteenth birthday arrived two days after the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is currently in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.
In relating the story of Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses her estranged husband, Frank, through a series of startingly direct letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son became, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general - and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need To Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents - whether in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, or Littleton - have gone nihilistically off the rails while growing up in the most prosperous country in history. Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story with an explosive, haunting ending. She considers motherhood, marriage, family, and career - while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.
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- New York : Counterpoint, c2003.
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