We Need to Talk About Kevin

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Imagine if you will that Chucky

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and Damien

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got together and created their own little Demon Seed

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to produce Rosemary’s Baby

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The resulting child would be Kevin, of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin fame.  The book that has confirmed and cemented my decision to NOT procreate.  EVER.

 

All kidding aside, this book is incredibly disturbing.  It started off really slow and plodding for me, and it took me ages to read, and I naively messaged a book club mate asking if she’d ever read it, what she thought about it and if it picked up at all.  Silly me.  Because the last 50 pages exploded with horror and kept me up half the night turning pages cause I Could. Not. Put. It. Down!

 

And when I reached the final sentence?  I was gobsmacked!  Quite simply speechless.

 

The story is told in epistolary form, a wife (Eva) writing letters to her husband (Franklin) two years after the terrible, tragic events of a certain Thursday which involved their son Kevin.  You immediately get the sense this is a family torn apart, and that husband and wife are separated, certainly they no longer live together and their lives do not intersect.  Eva chooses to detail her visits with Kevin in the juvenile detention facility he’s incarcerated in, in letter format, lengthy letters, in which she also painstakingly goes over their past as a family, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

 

We quickly come to the realization that the events of Thursday involved a school massacre and that Kevin was the shooter.  A very apropos topic considering the book was published in 2003, and the events of the school shooting took place in April 1999, just weeks prior to Columbine.  In fact, Columbine and other school shootings are discussed in detail throughout the novel in an attempt to understand what it is that drives these kids to commit these horrific acts.

 

As Eva tells her story, and it is very much her story, we get absolutely no events from any other character’s viewpoint, making one wonder how accurate of a narrator she is, the life of troubled child Kevin is played out before us, from Eva’s abrupt decision to conceive, even though she never particularly wanted children, to her struggle to bond with this seemingly demon child.  And Kevin is the worst child you could ever wish for.  He is portrayed as evil incarnate, with gleaming, mischievous eyes, behind which you just know he’s plotting his parents’ doom.

 

We like to think that children are innocent, sweet beings who only turn bad because they have bad parents, or fall in with a bad crowd, or some other environmental factor.  While Eva questions whether Kevin is a result of her inability to love him, it is fairly evident from the get go that there is just something not right with this child.  Although Kevin is incredibly brilliant at playing Richie Cunningham

and being the perfect son for his father, a mother knows her child, and Eva has no illusions about the evil that lurks behind that sardonic half-grin and the “Gee Dad!” playacting for husband Franklin.  The parental split causes Kevin to get away with far more mischief than should have been allowed.

 

As “accidents” begin to occur involving the people around Kevin, Eva is at a loss to convince Franklin there is something wrong with Kevin, and so Kevin grows older, and the “accidents” begin to occur within a wider and wider circle of acquaintances, until children at school and in play groups are being removed from his presence and parents are ostracizing Eva in the community.

 

Events escalate as the years progress until the only thing capable of stopping Kevin is the judicial system once the horrific school shooting occurs.  Was it possible to stop him?  Did Eva have any warning?  This is what she explores in her letters to Franklin.  The notion of responsibility, as well as remorse and compensation, and yet there is still the bond of mother and son that she continually seeks to form from the moment of his birth through to her regular visits to Kevin in jail. 

 

Part of the horror of this book for me was not so much Kevin and what he was capable off but Eva’s actions and complicit behaviour.  Perhaps it’s that a mother doesn’t want to admit her child could be that bad.  Perhaps it was being the one person calling foul, without her husband’s support, how was she to fight against Kevin’s behaviour?  Or perhaps she hoped to finally find the key to what made Kevin tick, to finally understand him, or that he would finally understand himself and battle these tendencies to hurt others.  However way you look at it, Eva remained in the marriage, in their home, and Kevin’s psychopathic behaviour continued to escalate.

 

Too realistic by far, the book may be slow reading at first, but the story, and characters will suck you in, until you need to know what happens next, and the disturbing tale of this boy and his deeds will haunt you long after the story is finished.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L :)

 

L Returns to the TBR Bookcase with the Letter B: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

When this little fable was first published in 1970 I’m told via Wikipedia, that it created quite the sensation.  I picked up my copy in last summer’s Raise a Reader book sale and it promptly went on the TBR bookcase.  Thanks to this year’s goal to read the A – C shelf, I pulled this gem down and gave it a go.

 

I liked it.  Found it strange at times, but the story of a seagull trying to be true to his own self and find meaning and purpose in life while bucking the trend of the pack, or in this case The Flock, is quite an inspiring one.

 

Jonathan Seagull loves to challenge himself.  He watches other bird species flying and thinks, “I can do that.”  Even though flying acrobatics aren’t part of a seagull’s life.  Instead of hanging out with The Flock, flying around incoming fishing boats and fighting over morsels of sea-catch, Jonathan spends his days practicing his new flying skills…high soaring climbs, deep speed-defying dives…until he transcends space and time and fulfills his destiny as a very unique, individual bird who will risk being ostracized from The Flock rather than mindlessly conform to monotony and the pack mentality. 

 

My only criticism of my little volume is that I wish the numerous photos of seagulls that illustrate this tale had been in color rather than black and white.  Otherwise, I quite enjoyed the fable.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

            ~ Groucho Marx

Catching Fire

I went to see the Hunger Games movie with one of my book clubs recently.  After being ambivalent about the movie since I really only enjoyed the second half of the book, right about when Katniss lands herself in the games and things get really exciting, I wasn’t too sure about seeing the movie.  Boy am I glad I did!  Loved the movie, and thought it was very close to the book.  The casting was pretty dead on for a number of characters too (love, love, love Stanley Tucci (Ceasar Flickerman) in everything he does!  Then there was the ever yummy Lenny Kravitz as Cinna.  Mm-mmm good!  With Donald Sutherland doing a delightful job as the imposing President Snow and well played as the drunk mentor Haymitch was Woody Harrelson.  Excellent casting choices all!).  I enjoyed the movie so much that I came out of the theatre dying to read the next book in the trilogy, Catching Fire.  And that is exactly what I did over Easter weekend and, well, I’m back to being ambivalent again….

 

Warning, SPOILERS abound.  If you haven’t read the book but want to, you might want to skip the next couple paragraphs.

 

The book opens with Katniss and her family living in the Victor’s Village along with Peeta and Haymitch.  They have so much food and money, there’s little left for Katniss to do, though she continues hunting in the woods to help her friend Gale and his family put food on the table.  Katniss is aware she will be expected to mentor this year’s Hunger Games contestants, and though she won the Games, not much in District 12 or the rest of the districts for that matter, has changed.  But before the games are announced, Katniss and Peeta must make a victory tour of all the districts and continue their star-crossed lovers routine as decreed by the evil President Snow because the districts are starting to rebel, and the Capital cannot have dissension in the Districts.  With Gale and her family threatened, Katniss and Peeta do their best to convince everyone they’re madly in love, even going so far as getting engaged, but it is not enough.

 

With this year being the seventy-fifth Hunger Games, a new twist is added.  Apparently, it is the year of the Quarter Quell.  Every twenty-five years the Hunger Games get a little more vicious.  Twenty-five years earlier, when Haymitch won the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes were sent from each district, meaning twice as many children died.  This year, the twist is that districts must pick tributes from their pack of victors.  As District 12 only has three victors in total, Katniss and Peeta are heading back into the ring.

 

Now who didn’t see that one coming?

 

Once again, I found the first half and particularly the middle of the book to be a slow read.  Once the games began however, the action picked up and the book became a page turner for me.  Obviously the storyline had to go in the direction of taking down the Capital, and I knew Katniss would play a pivotal role (she isn’t the heroine of the books for nothing), I was disappointed in the lack of imagination in revisiting the Games.  It all felt a bit “been there, done that” and I would have liked to have seen the author explore other ways to create a district uprising.  I guess I’ll have to see what Mockingjay, the third and final book of the trilogy has to offer in improvements to the story and/or satisfying conclusions.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

 

L Reads Alex Cross #11: Mary Mary

Every now and then I stumble across an Alex Cross book that reminds me why I’m slogging through this series.  Mary Mary, the 11^th book in the series, is one of Patterson’s masterpieces; well, as close as he can get to writing one.

 

Prominent Hollywood actors and producers are being killed by a person going by the name Mary Smith.  We know this because emails by Mary Smith, taking credit for the murders, are being sent to a reporter at the LA Times.  It is up to Alex Cross to track down and stop this killer. 

 

It’s a great little premise, with lots of appropriate red herrings this time.  We’re introduced to The Storyteller, a villain who we know is behind the killings, but yet we are left as much in the dark as Cross is, until slowly the story unfolds and Cross successfully catches his (wo)man.

 

Fleshing out the novel are the typical Cross family crises and love affairs.  Corny, boring, but must be gotten through if only in order to get back to the juicy tale of a murder hunt.

 

One of Patterson’s better Alex Cross books, Mary Mary is a satisfying read.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

            ~ Groucho Marx

 

Indigo Lakeshore Book Club Reads: A Visit from the Goon Squad

I am about to do this book a great disservice.  I read this book some several weeks ago, but never got around to writing up my review, and now the book club meeting is upon me, and with many books read inbetween, I will do my best to give you my impressions of the book.

 

A Visit From the Goon Squad is described as a novel on its cover, however, despite the interweaving of characters and events, it read far more, for me anyway, as a short story collection.  Each chapter was told from the perspective of a different character, and detailed events solely connected to their life, but while they intersected with other characters in other chapters, the book itself fails to read as a cohesive novel, with a solid beginning, middle and end.  I started off reading this book in one solid chunk, but due to class reading obligations, had to put it down for about a week somewhere around two-thirds into it.  This was unfortunate.  Because when I picked it up again, and started the next chapter, I couldn’t remember who all the characters were or how they interconnected.  This is not a good thing for a “novel”.  For a collection of short stories, however, it wouldn’t much matter….

 

The “novel” traverses several decades of the music industry, with characters who are producers, performers, and others working in the industry.  The music references were at times very obscure, so I had difficulty relating to the fervent love of music displayed by the people populating the novel.  The stereotypical “sex, drugs and rock n’roll” aspect of the industry was played out in the book, but rather than it being titillating, or even interesting to read, it all just fell so flat.  There characters were sad, washed up has-beens, and not one garnered enough sympathy from me to want to keep reading.  I think the only reason I did keep reading was because one of the very last chapters was done entirely in PowerPoint.  This was very cool.  The chapter was all about a kid who tracked the pauses in music, and how his family tried to understand why this was so fascinating to him.  The PowerPoint was a very cool touch in a novel that wasn’t otherwise so great.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

Well for once the cheese doesn’t stand alone. Yay!  To a one, the group did not much like this book.  There was some quirkiness in it that kept people reading, and which we could laugh at and about, but overall, the book failed to have any truly redeeming quality where we came away with a positive review or willingness to recommend it to others.

 

One of our members found a flowchart online of the overly numerous characters in the book, and we all agreed, had we had that chart at hand while reading the novel, it would have been more enjoyable, because it was very hard to remember who was who from one chapter to the next.  Too bad somebody didn’t think to publish that in the book, say for its frontispiece perhaps?

 

We did agree that had the author narrowed down her focus to one or two characters, the particularly memorable ones like Bennie, the aging record exec, or his assistant Sasha, we would have enjoyed reading it more.  There was just too little character development and no real movement to the story for our liking.

 

It should be noted that this book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.  One member queried what was it about the book that made it win?  From Wikipedia, it says that “the Pulitzer Prize Board noted that the novel was an ‘inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.’”  Umm, okay then.

 

Pretty safe to say, give this one a pass.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

Windsor Book Club Reads: Mystic River

I have a confession to make.  I didn’t read this month’s book for book club.  Well, correction, I had read it about three years ago, and I’ve seen the movie a couple of times, so when I picked it up a couple weeks back to re-read it in time for book club, I just couldn’t do it.  It’s a good book, one that I definitely recommend, but I didn’t love it enough to revisit it in a second reading, especially when so many new-to-me books are out there just begging to be read.

 

But I did attend the meeting last night at the Green Bean Café, and really enjoyed being more observer, less participant.  It’s fun hearing what others have to say about a book.  I need to keep my mouth shut more often, I’m thinking lol.

 

We have a really diverse group of readers in our club, which makes these meetings a lot of fun.  Once again, opinions on the book were split. Some liked the book, others didn’t, and one or two never finished reading it.  One gentleman just wasn’t in the mood for a dark book (which is kinda also why I didn’t re-read it.  I had Betty White’s latest sitting on the library pile and the need to laugh far outweighed the need for dark suspense).  Some had seen the movie (starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon) before ever picking up the book and were disappointed in knowing the ending already.  They still enjoyed Dennis Lehane’s writing, but would have enjoyed the suspenseful read more had they not seen the movie.

 

Reviews were mixed too on Lehane’s writing style.  Some loved his writing, others didn’t care for it.  But the more the book and its plot points and characters were discussed, the more those who didn’t overly enjoy the book seemed to find a new sense of possibility in their reading enjoyment.  That’s what I love the most about book clubs.  Readers who are open to discussing books also tend to be open minded about what others enjoy about books and willing to look differently at a book the second time around.

 

For those not familiar with book or movie, here’s a brief synopsis:

 

The novel opens with three youths, Jimmy, Sean and Dave, rough housing in the street of a poor neighbourhood in south Boston.  A car pulls up and two men claiming to be police officers lure Dave into the backseat and drive away.  Dave returns home some hours later noticeably changed.  What occurs during the brief abduction is left to the reader’s imagination, but it’s pretty clear Dave was abused and irrevocably changed by it.  Fast forward into the future and the boys are now men, still living in the same neighbourhood, married with kids, when Jimmy’s teenage daughter is brutally killed.  Suspicion lands on Dave and the already shaky friendship bonds between the three men are put to the final test.

 

Both movie and book are well worth your time.  Check them out.  You won’t be disappointed.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

“The Martians are Coming! The Martians are Coming!”

Let me just preface this review with this statement:  I am no fan of science fiction, though I have read and enjoyed some futuristic novels, when it comes to technical gadgetry or beings from other planets, my brain tunes out.  It’s just not my cup of tea as I’m fond of saying.

 

So when H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds turned up on my Victorian Literature syllabus, I was of two minds regarding it.  It’s a classic, therefore worthy of reading.  But invasion scare novels that star super intelligent beings from Mars attacking Earth don’t really ring my bell.  Wells, however, was a prolific author publishing in the late 1800s into the early 1900s and was considered very prophetic, his books after all dealt with gas warfare long before the advent of WWI, so I gave it my best shot.

 

In War of the Worlds, Wells takes a stab at critiquing his Victorian counterparts who have invaded and colonized much of the world by having Britain invaded in her turn by superior beings from Mars who consider Britons little more than dumb animals.  The Martians, when they arrive, turn out to be hostile beings, killing indiscriminately and are apparently undefeatable until a little thing called bacteria bites them in the proverbial butt.  The story is a firsthand account told from the perspective of the Speculative Philosopher, who also critiques the newspapers of the day, that apparently aren’t publishing the truth about the invasion and properly preparing the smug British population for the forthcoming attack.  There is some gadgetry description, and the Martians, rather than being the little green men I was raised to believe, are brown fungoid brains, with little use for bodies.  They have strange tentacles, hands really, that propel them along, when not riding around in machinery.  Springing off Darwin’s evolutionary theory in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, it was theorized that man would eventually become only rational beings, with no need for our emotional, feeling bodies.  The Martian’s Wells portrays is a critique of this theory.

 

There’s a lot going on in this one little book, and I’d love to say I thoroughly enjoyed it, but sadly that is not the case.  If you are a sci-fi enthusiast and haven’t read anything by Wells, I strongly urge you to.  As an early pioneer of the genre, and for his prophetic writing Wells is well worth checking out.  This non-sci-fi chick however will consider it an interesting read for an English Lit class and be thankful it’s over.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

 

“So many books, so little time.”

~ Frank Zappa

 

 

L Returns to the TBR Bookcase With the Letter B

I absolutely love Nick Bantock’s books.  His artwork alone makes for a visual masterpiece and nicely enhances the story.  I am unfortunately missing the first two books in the Griffin and Sabine saga, but their lack in my collection thankfully doesn’t detract overmuch from the reading of the rest of the series.  I just lament I don’t have the artwork of those books to enjoy as well. 

 

These books are unique in that the story is told through a series of postcards and letters.  Each page is a beautiful piece of art, similar to the picture above as both sides of the postcards are depicted.  Envelopes, front and back are also works of art, with flaps you can lift in order to remove the letter, often handwritten, sometimes typed, as are the postcards.  Reading these books is like being a voyeur with your hand in someone else’s mailbox.  Through these postcards and letters, snippets of the lives and relationship of Griffin and Sabine, and later Matthew and Isabella are revealed.

 

The story is fantastical.  Griffin and Sabine are lovers corresponding via snail mail.  Both are artists, and their drawings grace their mail.  They also have a metaphysical connection, where they can see each other’s work in visions.  The villain, Frolatti attempts to destroy them, but they manage to escape and merge as one.  Their story is then continued in the lives and relationship of Matthew and Isabella. 

 

Fantastical, yes, but truly imaginative with characters who simply come to life amidst the background of Bantock’s simply beautiful artwork.  What makes the books so enjoyable for me is first and foremost his art, followed closely by that delightfully voyeuristic peek into other people’s lives through their mail.  Mail has always held a fascination for me.  I’m old enough to remember sending and receiving handwritten letters through the post and what a delight it was to sit down with a letter and hear a cherished friend’s voice in your head as you read their words.  Letters are incredibly intimate things, filled with our desires and dreams, our wants and wishes, our loves and heartaches.  Long before the telephone was a staple in every home, letters were how we connected with distant friends and family.  I think that’s why I love reading epistolary novels so much.  Like diaries, letters are far more intimate than reading a regular story told from the perspective of an omniscient and removed narrator.  Even first person accounts fail to fully satisfy, since they only give one perspective.  I’m never fully satisfied unless I know what everyone’s thinking and feeling – I’m nosy that way – and letters give the most intimate look into one’s soul, at least in my opinion.

 

If you come across a Nick Bantock book, take a moment and dive in, experience his pictures, read his words, you’ll be glad you did.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”

~ Oscar Wilde