{"id":2994,"date":"2010-12-05T15:00:44","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T15:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=2994"},"modified":"2010-12-05T15:00:44","modified_gmt":"2010-12-05T15:00:44","slug":"i-need-to-blog-about-kevin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/i-need-to-blog-about-kevin\/","title":{"rendered":"I need to blog about Kevin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?lt1=_blank&#038;bc1=FFFFFF&#038;IS2=1&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;t=thewidblo-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;m=amazon&#038;f=ifr&#038;asins=1846687349\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" align=\"left\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe>My Scottish family have for ages been nagging me to read Lionel Shriver&#8217;s <i>We need to talk about Kevin<\/i>.  If they hadn&#8217;t been so insistent, I would probably have put it away after a couple of chapters &ndash; it was slow-moving and not exactly a page-turner.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say that it isn&#8217;t in many ways a good book.  There are lots of wonderful passages throughout the book, but it didn&#8217;t really come together for me.<\/p>\n<p>As far as I know, Lionel Shriver is childless, and she wrote <i>Kevin<\/i> at a time when she seriously had to decide whether she wanted to be a mother (she decided against it).<\/p>\n<p>The book basically strikes me as being a childless person&#8217;s collection of parental horror stories &ndash; I imagine she might have been asking everybody she knew about the worst thing they had ever experienced a child do, and then strung it all together as a book.<\/p>\n<p>The result is to my mind not very believable.  Every simple episode strikes me as being authentic, but I don&#8217;t believe they could all have been done by the same child.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, I don&#8217;t think any teenager as clever and articulate as Kevin would find it necessary to commit a school massacre &ndash; he would have so many other ways to spread havoc without having to go to gaol for anything.<\/p>\n<p>However, many people have clearly found it plausible enough to enjoy it, so do read it and judge for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Scottish family have for ages been nagging me to read Lionel Shriver&#8217;s We need to talk about Kevin. If they hadn&#8217;t been so insistent, I would probably have put it away after a couple of chapters &ndash; it was slow-moving and not exactly a page-turner. That&#8217;s not to say that it isn&#8217;t in many ways a good book. There are lots of wonderful passages throughout the book, but it didn&#8217;t really come together for me. As far as I know, Lionel Shriver is childless, and she [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,115,135],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-kids","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}