Diary of a Bibliophile - Day 2

What I'm reading: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Coffee Consumption: 1 coffee, 1 chai (excellent!)

Okay, I've found another great book. I am reading this on the heels of Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, so it is appropriate that it is about the mother of a teen killer.

In this book, Shriver tells the story of a sixteen year old boy who goes on a shooting rampage in his high school. What makes this book unique is that the story is told from the perspective of his mother through a series of letters written to her estranged husband.

The story takes a hard look at how it feels to be the parent of a killer. The main character searches her soul for the causes of her child's tragic downfall. She questions herself, her marriage, and her reasons for having a child in the first place. She examines her feelings honestly, and challenges the reader to take a closer look at the typical American family. In essence, her examination of her own life is really a microscopic look at one cell, of many, that breathes life into our culture as a whole. Are we, as a society, in some way partially responsible for breeding a generation of killers?

I am only at the beginning of the book, and already I have all these questions racing through my mind. What is a good parent? What is our real motivation for having a child in the first place? Is it selfish? Are we responsible for the actions of our children? Up to what point? How much can we control? Whose fault is it when a child, like Kevin, loses control? The child? The parent? Both? Our society as a whole? What are our cultural values concerning children and are they healthy? What is our collective responsibility to our society and its children? I love a book that makes me think.

Shriver is also an excellent writer. Her sentences are long and witty, sprinkled with every day anecdotes to which everyone can relate. And as much as I love contemporary fiction, I find many of the novels I read mind-numbingly (okay, maybe I made that word up, but perhaps it will be added to Webster's next year?!) simplistic in style and vocabulary. Not so with this book. Shriver has a gift for artfully styling her sentences. She also uses vocabulary that is not geared toward your average fifth grade student (the practice of which has spread like a cancerous tumor through popular fiction these days.) I hate it when I have to read a classic just to get my fill of well-written prose. (More on that another day.) But this month, I won't have to do that. We Need to Talk About Kevin is written for an adult audience and it actually uses adult vocabulary.

Okay, enough ranting. This is a great book! Get it. Read it. You won't be disappointed. The theme is current, the story is well-crafted and the vocabulary is refreshing.

I give it five out of five Dark Chocolate Covered Coffee Beans. (Stars are so passe'.)

Bea