"A stunning examination of how
tragedy affects a town, a marriage, and a family.
That neither
nature nor nurture bears sole responsibility for a
child's character is self-evident. But such
generalizations provide cold comfort if it's your
own child who's just opened fire on his fellow
algebra students and whose class photograph-with its
unseemly grin-is blown up on the evening news
coast-to-coast.
The question
of who's to blame for teenage atrocity tortures our
narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. How much is her fault?
Two years ago, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his
fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and
a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only
fifteen at the time, he received a lenient sentence
and is now in a prison for young offend ers in
upstate New York.
We Need to
Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for
why so many white, well-to-do adolescents have gone
off the rails while growing up in suburban comfort.
Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling,
absorbing, and resonant story 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."
