I finally got to attend a Book Club get together and it didn’t disappoint. Our lovely host made us delicious nacho’s and after devouring them, we settled in to talk about our latest read, We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

Where do I start? I loved the idea of this book. Shriver let’s us ‘behind the scenes’so to speak, to help us see what it is like to be the mother of a child who does something unimaginable. I also liked the questions it raised. Are the kids who go on school massacres born evil, or do they become evil?

Where the story lost me was the fact that I couldn’t connect or even remotely like any of the characters. Eva is a mother who never really wanted her son, Kevin is the misfit who is only happy when doing something devious, and his father Franklin who doesn’t appear to support his wife, and has pulled the wool over his own eyes when it comes to Kevin. As well as not connecting with any of the characters, I became bored and struggled to get through the book because of the way it is written. Everything was over explained and a lot of the time I didn’t feel it added to the story.

This wasn’t the consensus around the group. It was actually a very interesting conversation with varied opinions. Many members of the group really enjoyed the book once they got into it.

Overall the average score we gave We Need to Talk About Kevin was 8.5 out of 10.

The next book we will be reading is The Pilots Wife by Anita Shreve.

Have you read either of these books? Let me know in the comments below!