Blogs: My Books 
I’ll try to review the books I’ve read, so it’s more than just a list of books
We need to talk about Kevin
We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (who is female, obviously)
Plot: A fifteen year old boy, Kevin, kills several of his fellow pupils at school – and a cafeteria worker, let’s not forget, and is sent to a juvenile detention centre, as he is underage, to be sent to prison proper at eighteen. His mother, Eva, subsequently visits him fortnightly, and writes a series of letters to his father, and her husband, Franklin, about how she felt towards the conception and bringing up of this child.
I finished this today, after a very slow start. The letter format put me off straightaway but none-the-less, I began. And wished I hadn’t. The style is particularly long-winded and fanciful, which is tedious, really. In order to get some background into the letters, Shriver makes Eva write things that seem artificial in a letter to her husband, who presumably would know basic and simple facts about his wife, like where she grew up and so on. There is also the question of whether Franklin actually reads these letters or not – Eva does not make reference to any replies she may or may not get. She writes to him so frequently, that he must be inundated with them, though, so you’re thinking about it a lot. She writes to him on Christmas day, and wishes him merry Christmas; you’d think she knew the postman would be working then. It’s really weird.
The relationship between Eva and Kevin is peculiar. Maybe that’s why the book has such a prickly feel to it. Also, Franklin’s blindness to his son’s weird behaviour is frustrating, if Eva is indeed telling like it is.
SPOILER: We do find out near the end about the reply situation; she never gets any replies; this is because Kevin killed his dad before he killed the people at school. Once I found this out, I felt deflated, as if this was the whole point of the book, but it was nice, I suppose, to see that Kevin and Eva came to some sort of mutual understanding.