We Need to Talk About Kevin

That neither nature nor nurture bears sole responsibility for a child's character is self-evident.

But such generalizations provide cold comfort if it's your own child who's just opened fire on his fellow algebra students and whose class photograph--with its unseemly grin--is blown up on the evening news coast-to-coast.

The question of who's to blame for teenage atrocity tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian.

How much is her fault? Two years ago, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the time, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York. "We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white, well-to-do adolescents have gone off the rails while growing up in suburban comfort.

Instead, Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying tableaus of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy of a country where everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.