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I just finished reading We Need to Talk About Kevin about twenty minutes ago and I am completely drained by the whole thing. Shriver is an amazing writer who not only creates some very suspenseful moments and a jaw-dropping plot twist, but also manages to create a main character readers are sure to feel ambivalent about.

Never have I started and stopped a book so many times...not because it was boring or badly written, but because it was so disturbing and powerful at times I didn't think I could take it.

It will make you uneasy more times than not and the main character is often aloof and pretentious, even dislikable. But the thing about Lionel Shriver's novel is that it's100 percent mesmerizing from beginning to end. You may think you want to stop reading (I returned it unfinished to the library the first time I had it), but you won't be able to (the next day I pulled it back off the shelf and continued reading.)

It's creepy and well-written and full of  the kind of writing that puts things the way you wish you could say them.  Eva is never afraid to say what she really thinks, even if it makes her look bad. She wonders if her doubts about motherhood and having such a terrible time raising her son may be the cause of the disaster that has become her everyday life, which mostly consists of having people recognize her when she's out in public and visiting her son in prison on certain Saturdays of the month.

The Boston Globe called Shriver's novel "searing" and "brutally honest"  and it won the Orange Prize in 2005.  This suspenseful tale, written in a series of letters to her often clueless husband by a woman recounting a lifetime of events leading up to her son's murderous rampage at his high school, is hard to shake. Shriver takes "a calculated risk" (as the Wall Street Journal reviewed) "but the gamble pays off as she strikes a tone of compelling intimacy."

Once you finish this read, be ready to have it on your mind for several days after...it's that compelling and that good, but it comes with a price: that feeling in your stomach when a book sucker punches you.