I’ve read several books lately about school shootings, but none quite like We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. The story is told by the shooter’s mother Eva in a series of letters from Eva to her estranged husband. By recounting the events leading up to the shooting including her marriage and her son Kevin’s birth and early childhood, Eva tries to understand why Kevin has murdered seven classmates and a teacher and whether she or her husband could be partly to blame for Kevin’s actions. Was Kevin a bad seed from the beginning or did his mother’s cold, unloving nature drive him to such a monstrous act?

As a narrator, Eva is sarcastic, sometimes funny, often cold and self-absorbed, but always brutally honest. For me, the most gut-wrenching part of the book was Eva’s description of her ambivalence about becoming and being a mother. She readily admits that she was reluctant to give up her career to have a child and that, even after his birth, she had trouble bonding with her baby. Eva isn’t an easy character to like or even to sympathize with, but her honesty is admirable.

The author has admitted to having similar mixed feelings about motherhood as her main character; maybe that’s why Eva’s character rings so true. Don’t be fooled by the author’s masculine name (like I was); “Lionel” Shriver is a woman. In 2005 she won the Orange Prize for Fiction, a prize awarded for the best novel written by a woman in English, for We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Readers who enjoy the “ripped from the headlines” storylines of Jodi Picoult novels will find similarities in this book, especially in Shriver’s exploration of difficult family relationships. But Shriver’s work is far darker and grittier; there are no easy answers here. Overall, I found We Need to Talk About Kevin to be a disturbing but riveting read.

Reviewed by Christy Molzen

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