We Need To Talk About Kevin | Review

I recently featured this book in my June Favourites post talking about how much I had been loving it, and although it has taken me a while, I have now finished it and haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

It's got everything I love in a novel: a compelling narrative, passages that dare to shock, and a truly moving conclusion that gives all sorts of closure without it having to be particularly heartbreaking or a fairytale ending. It was difficult for me to get into in the first few chapters, and I struggled with Eva's first person narrative once Kevin was born, simply due to how my personal viewpoint in the beginning was that she chose to see the bad in her son, however as Kevin progressed to an age in which he was able to speak and act for himself, I started to genuinely, almost morbidly, enjoy the story that unfolded after that.

For those of you who don't know, this book is written in a series of letters from a woman called Eva, to her estranged husband regarding their son, Kevin, who two years previously committed a high school massacre. The main focus of these letters seems to be Eva coming to some kind of understanding as to why their son did what he did, and whilst the story seems a mixture of passages that indicate it being a product of his nature and the way he was nurtured by his parents, parts of it also allude to the wider problem of school shootings and the problem of gun control in America: something that is still a very topical debate today.

For me, the book is a deeply honest, sometimes funny sometimes poignant, exploration of the almost unnerving understanding between a child and their mother, as I do genuinely believe that Kevin and Eva understand one another so much that they're constantly conscious of their actions around one another. 

What ultimately provoked Kevin to go through with Thursday I have no idea, but the theory I support the most is that it was to do with Eva: I think that he cared for her more than he let on, and her inability to care for him gave him the desire to bereave her of anything she ever wanted or cared about, as well as box her into the cliche of another 'mother whose son has committed a school shooting', something Eva would have despised.

If you're wanting to read a book that affirms your life; this is definitely not for you. Only read if, like me, you want to read a terrifyingly real account of how it is not innate for a mother to like her child, how more often than not mothers and fathers fuck up in all sorts of ways, whether it is obvious or not, and how, even if you try to convince yourself otherwise, the thought of becoming a mother is petrifying and, sometimes, utterly repulsive.