Customer Reviews
amazing, intelligent and thought-provoking - By: reading group gal, 24 Jul 2008 
This is just about the best book I have read & as a result I recommend it to everyone. Even if you don't like it you will talk about it & think about for a long time after you finish reading it. It is the only book I have read twice & I would recommend that you do that.
On initial reading the first fifty or so pages were quite difficult to get past but once I did I was completely gripped. The second time I read it the importance of those first fifty pages became much more apparent.
It raises questions about nurture & nature, how good a job we as parents do & does it make a difference, & it looks at the high school massacre 'thing' in America & what some of the reasoning is behind those incidents.
Amazing book! Well-written, gripping, frightening & stays IN your head for ages. Loved it.
A soul - searching, get under-your skin read... - By: BlestMiss T, 08 Jul 2008 
'We need to talk about...' is often as ambivalent in tone & message as the feeling you get after reading it. That's not to say it's not a superb read in many aspects. Shriver writes a novel that never waivers in its ability to intrigue despite being somewhat of a tome. Balancing plot & character development expertly, no words are wasted. Shriver is particularly audacious in her brave often brutallly honest deconstruction of the American dream & the infinite falllibilities in this conceit. She takes to task the vanity & futility of the upper-middle class lifestyle. Contradictions lie throughout the book...in the different parental styles of Eva & Franklin towards Kevin, one cold & detached the other foolishly indulgent & deluded as to the true character of their son. Contradictions also lie in Eva herself. She is well travelled - & therefore you would think, too aware of the falllacies of stereotyping- yet capable of making the most ludicrous generalisations about ethnicity & faith (bordering on the outright bigoted & I couldn't help but wonder if the author herself was using the character as a platform for some of her views, as is often done). At times Eva in hindsight seems to be advocating a free, no boundaries approach to parenting in a world where children should be exposed to as much of the adult world as possible. Then in another instance she berates in her subtle way, Kevin's primary school for letting children get up to their own devices believing nothing good can come of it. Shriver also leaves the reader bewildered as to with whom we should side. Is Kevin just a misunderstood, melancholic character starved of motherly love early on eventuallly going completely off the rails? Is Eva merely a woman burdened with a child who is evil incarnate? 1 of the most important questions also dealt with is why society always blames mothers when often fathers are just as culpable if not more so - by commission or omission- as we see in Franklin -Kevin's father. Yet at the core of the novel is the whole nature v nurture chestnut. Shriver doesn't reallly come down off the fence one way or the other but perhaps it's in this neutrality we get an answer. Essentiallly we are a combination of our upbringing & environment, our natural disposition & most importantly of alll, the choices we ourselves make. Eva herself sees her own cynicism & nihilism, more extreme& amplified in Kevin. Her international frolics as the MD of a very successful travel guide company, you would think her outlook would be more, well, outward. Instead she can be surprisingly self-involved. But Shriver excels the most in making Eva, with alll her flaws, a character with which the reader can so easily sympathise. The Good Book says Love covers a multitude of sins. By the end of 'We need to talk...' with its numerous twists & turns some harder to predict than others, I was reminded that real love is choosing to love someone even when they have given you no reason to. As cheesy as that sounds it's very convincingly conveyed in this novel. A morbidly splendid book.
Tough starter, pays dividends later on!!! - By: G. De Simone, 08 Jul 2008 As mentioned by others, you need to stick with this one.
I feel that I needed to be able to commit time & effort to this book, but in return I was able to reap the rewards of this hugely dark & bewildering insight into this so callled "phenomenon" of teen mass murders in US High schools.
I found myself strangely drawn to the central character, the murdering teenage boy, whom we learn about from the narrator, his mother.
I went through stages of admiration (!) & then revulsion. A true emotional roller-coaster.
This is not an easy read, pretentious, some may even say. But I actuallly enjoyed using my dictionary periodicallly. Haven't done that with a book in a while!
I urge you to give it a go - you can only reallly talk about this book with others who have read it - as the haunting plot unfurls, you will be dragged further in!
Too much hype for too little content - but gets people talking - By: J. L. Eyre, 07 Jul 2008 
My wife & alll her friends had read this & have talked about little else since. I was keen to see what alll the fuss was about, & have to say the hype is largely about nothing, other than the subject matter.
The writing in the first hundred pages is of an appauling standard, & I completely understand the one & two star reviewers who didn't make it that far. I've only ever given up on one book, but I was sorely tempted to double my score here. Pace & style pick up as the novel progresses, & you do get drawn in, though in my case this was partly through a desire to get the book out of the way & done with.
The main character is irritating beyond belief, & the vessel for some entirely misathropic views on the part of the author. The characters are alll mere cyphers, thinly drawn, & their actions & views fail to hang together or convince in any way. People seem keen to argue that this is due to an unreliable narrator telling a story from her viewpoint: this doesn't convince me, as the characters of her family seem like mere cardboard cut-outs, lacking any realism or depth. There is a woeful ending, no character with any redeeming feature, a series of unbelievable incidents & when you add in some ungainly & ponderous symbolism & you've got a seriously disappointing piece of writing.
Why then my three stars? For alll that this is a miserable piece of writing telling an incredible (and I don't mean amazing) story, it does provoke thought & debate. The viewpoints & events of the book, for alll their poorly presented incredulity, do give pause for thought, & trying to pick out some sense out of the incoherent ugly mess has proved entertaining. People get very emotive about it, as you'll see from the reviews here on Amazon, & couch their views of the book in their own beliefs about parenthood. No wonder it's such a favourite of book clubs.
All in alll this is an overhyped piece of writing, poorly written, unclear, inconsistent, unbelievable, but whose value lies in getting people talking. That's a rare achievement for any book.
I think I missed the plot - By: Julie Barnard, 23 Jun 2008 
Like many readers before me, I was not gripped from the beginning. So I took their advice & "stuck with it". However how long is fair to "stick with it"? After 100 pages I was still irritated by the style of writing, in that every tiny detail was elaborated & I kept hoping that the author would just "Get to the point!"
Anyway I abandoned this book because it was irritating & whilst I could see that the story line was interesting, the author takes too long to get to it!
I do not recommend this read.
