On My Bookshelf: We Need To Talk About Kevin

If you love Jodi Picoult like I do, then you may be interested in this new author I discovered Lionel Shriver. I am reading We Need To Talk About Kevin and I cannot put this book down. If it wasnt for the back to school party - I would have finished in a few days.


In typical Picoult style a very sensitive topic is chosen, this one about a mother who is is uncertain from the beginning about motherhood who questions it through a series of letters to her husband two years after "Thursday" the day her 16 year old son went on a killing spree at a school two days before his 16th birthday.

The writing is eloquent. In chapter one, the first letter to her husband, Franklin, Eva describes the apartment she has rented and Shriver writes "Oh, you'd be horrified; its flimsy pressboard cabinetry defies your father's motto " Materials are everything." But it is the very quality of barely hanging on that I cherish. " The letters are filled with emotion so raw and real, you just have to wonder why know one else has captured the sacrifices a mother makes not from birth, but conception.