We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

Eva is very unmaternal. She never wanted children and they weren't part of her life-plan. So when she fell pregnant with Kevin a huge weight landed on her shoulders, one she has carried through her life, not helped by the fact that her son is cold and unlovable.

Kevin's story comes to a head two days before his sixteenth birthday when he murders nine people in a high school crossbow shooting. It seems he's been planning this for a long time.

Two years after the event Eva writes a series of letters to her now estranged husband, and it is these letters that form the novel.

The twist at the end, well from what I've read online it seems a lot of people saw this coming. Maybe I just read this quite naively (I'm normally quite on top of plot twists) but I didn't see this one coming at all. Not wanting to potentially reveal anything, I'll leave that one there!

When starting up with this book I did make a few false-starts. Shriver didn't really engage with me for the first 100 pages or so. It's a really slow starter. I can't tell you what made me stick with it. Maybe curiosity, or maybe it was the fact that it had been so highly recommended, I didn't want to miss anything. Either way, it paid off.

If you can slog through the first few pages, the rest of the novel is very engaging, with the last quarter of the book being fast paced and very eventful. There's no denying that the subject matter is sensitive, and at times can be very graphic, but I feel that the gruesome-ness was justified as a way of painting Kevin's character to us. It was needed to help us understand.

Heart-wrenching at times. but worth the read.