Today: Mar 28, 2024

Book Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin

Brianne KaneSpecial to the Southern News

“We Need To Talk About Kevin” is not for light reading before bed, nor is it the kind of book you flip through a few pages and forget all about it – this book will eat you alive. “We Need To Talk About Kevin” sucks in readers from the very beginning about a boy who born and from the very beginning his mother can tell something is “off.” But no one else sees it. The story begins with the mother, Eva, going on about her and her husband’s marriage. They were in love, they made love, they had fantabulous adventures and since she was a traveling columnist, she had many adventures of her own! Until her husband started mentioning, and mentioning, and mentioning starting a family.

So she got pregnant. And immediately she could tell something was odd. Eva never really wanted to be a mother, so she figured she was just freaking herself out with this concern about something being “off” about her pregnancy. The baby, Kevin, is born a beautiful bouncing baby boy. But Kevin is a torturous child. The only person Kevin will stop screaming for is his father, as if Kevin knows if he makes Eva’s complaints seem outrageous then she herself will seem outrageous, or crazy. Franklin, Kevin’s father and Eva’s husband, does start to wonder if Eva is crazy or just resents their son somehow. Soon Eva gets pregnant again with a daughter, Celia. This “happy” family then tries to manage living with Kevin…and then living without him.

As the story continues, the readers see Kevin only through Eva’s eyes, nonetheless her concern that something is inherently wrong with Kevin becomes more and more believable. Eva says she feels a bond with Kevin, no doubt as his mother, but also as the person who understands him – who doesn’t fall for his façade, like his father does. As Kevin grows older, eating, pooping and speaking now, he becomes stranger and even more frightening. Eva mentions being scared of Kevin, being scared of being alone with him.

Throughout the novel Eva drops in little memories of when she traveled, when she was happy, and didn’t have a psychopath for a son – the good ol’ days. Kevin’s behavior escalates in middle school and high school, and he makes friends finally however with odd and somewhat frightening children. Kevin gets in trouble; Eva wants to reprimand him while Franklin thinks Kevin can do no wrong. Celia ends up being the post child for perfection, being very quiet and polite at all times compared to the snarling and rude Kevin.

Let me explain: Kevin is a psychopath. Psychopathy is an antisocial personality disorder, and psychopathy means it is more genetic than environmental. This means that his “bad” behavior is not the usual sneaking out to go to a party in high school, when Kevin acted out badly it changed people’s lives forever. For instance, he made a lie about a drama teacher at his school sexually harassing him. Kevin held a cloth of poison to Celia’s eye, his little sister (in kindergarten at the time), until it was so badly burned she needs the entire eye to be removed at a hospital.

At the end of the book we finally see the big event: Kevin kills seven of his peers, a cafeteria worker and a teacher with a bow and arrow. From the beginning we know this ending is coming, as the story itself is structured around Eva’s visits to Kevin in jail, however nevertheless the final chapters of the novel are difficult just because you know it’s coming.

So you see, this book will eat you alive. This is the book you sit down with one weekend and show who is boss by reading it in one sitting. This is the book you cry and curse and scream at. This is the book you read over and over. The trauma of a school shooting is fresh in this country, especially in Connecticut, but this novel allows us into the minds of the attackers, and of their families. Kevin may be a psychopath, he may be one of the most terrifying children ever, but even he has a mom that tucked him in and kissed him goodnight. This novel allows us to hear her story, of what it means to create a baby, raise that baby into a young man, and watch as that young man laughs at his trial for murdering nine people.

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