[ book tip by Emily Bullock ] I have to confess that for the first one hundred pages I just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about with this book. I found the narrator annoying and the story slow. But a friend urged me to press on and dutifully I did... can I just say that was the best advice I have ever received. This book is amazing!! (Notice the exclamation marks, I hate them myself but nothing else seems to show how good this book is.) I’m sure that in a hundred years' time this book will still be heralded as a classic. Shriver takes that all too familiar story of an American High School shooting and does something brave and horrifying with it. I don’t want to give anything away but suffice it to say that you think you know what happened on that day Kevin went to school but nothing will prepare you for Shriver’s revelations. I was left physically reeling.

Telling the story in epistolary form, Kevin’s mother Eva speaks of that tragic day and Kevin’s childhood. All the letters are addressed to her husband Franklin, and his absence is a haunting forewarning of what is to come. Although Eva will draw you in, and as a reader I was swept along by her narration, there are a few moments when you can’t help thinking ‘is this the whole story?’ ‘Did it really happen that way?’ Shriver is a master of suspense, dropping in clues and hints about the past and the future. Kevin’s very presence shimmers off the page in all his nasty glory, but for all that he is still just a young boy. Is that any excuse? The genius of this book is that it leaves so many questions. Very rarely does a book stay with me as long as I feel this one will. In fact if I close my eyes and think about that day at the school I can see it all as if I was actually there. Horrifying but totally compelling.

[ book info ] Shriver, Lionel: We Need to Talk About Kevin. (Book language: English) Serpent's Tail, London, 2006 (2003). ISBN: 1-85242-467-2.