Terry's review
We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.)
by Lionel Shriver
Terry's review
We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel (P.S.) by Lionel Shriver
Terry's review
rating:
bookshelves:
fiction
This book made me feel...icky. I had heard many good things about it for years, since the hardcover was first released, and I was looking forward to reading it. It literally made me feel like I needed to take a purifying shower afterwards. I did not even want to have the book in my bedroom!
I was also shocked to find out it is/was considered by some reviewers to be a "feminist" book. Um, what? I mean, okay, the female main character (I can't even bring myself to call her a protagonist) is ambivalent at best about having a child. That makes the book feminist? Hmmm. I would argue that the book is, in fact, the opposite (erm, anti-feminist?), because at the very end of the book the author seems to blame the mother's very ambivalence for all the violence that follows over the years, and the very VERY end of the book chains the mother to her child in a way I felt to be spectacularly cruel considering the mayhem he's wrought. Therefore, it felt as if Shriver is actually punishing ...more
I was also shocked to find out it is/was considered by some reviewers to be a "feminist" book. Um, what? I mean, okay, the female main character (I can't even bring myself to call her a protagonist) is ambivalent at best about having a child. That makes the book feminist? Hmmm. I would argue that the book is, in fact, the opposite (erm, anti-feminist?), because at the very end of the book the author seems to blame the mother's very ambivalence for all the violence that follows over the years, and the very VERY end of the book chains the mother to her child in a way I felt to be spectacularly cruel considering the mayhem he's wrought. Therefore, it felt as if Shriver is actually punishing ...more
