We Need to Talk About Kevin ***

*** We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver, 2003

Another book loaned by The Learned One. Good writing, good story, good ending, although I suspected the ending early, saw it coming for sure on page 225 out of 400 pages. The only question left about the ending at that point was not "what happens" but "how does it happen."

I found the complete cluelessness of the father incredible, and in the first 100 or so pages I got a little weary of some of the diatribes and the telling instead of showing, but it got better as things went on and I actually stayed up past 3 am to finish it, which tells you something about the intensity at the end.

Shriver paints a chilling portrait of the first 16 years of the life of a sociopathic genius as seen through the eyes of his ambitious and ambivalent mother.

Worth a read.