Friday, March 30, 2012

Reading this week...

I've had this one reserved at the library for a while. When I went to pick it up this morning, with toddler and baby in tow, the woman who checked it out for me told me it was "disturbing" and she didn't know whether she could have read it when she had young kids. She said it was very good though.

I'm expecting it will be. The subjects (dysfunctional attachment and parenting) are things that I'm interested in from a professional viewpoint. But I'm hoping it won't freak me out too much if I recognise any of my own feelings in it.

I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie, which must be due out on DVD soon, I think.
Anyone else read it? Or seen the movie?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Karen, I read tis years ago. Sue M gave it to me, on the advice of Doug. It really did disturb me, I read it through but it bothered me a lot. I won't be seeing the movie. Interesting to see what you think of it. Alana

Karen said...

Watched the movie on Saturday night, it's a new release on DVD. Disturbing was certainly a good description.
I am going to finish the book but at least that might not shock me as much now that I know how it ends.

The guy that played Kevin in the movie was very creepy. It was something about his eyes, don't know how to describe it other than that they had no expression in them. I have seen kids like this before (there's one in Liam's class now, in fact) and they worry me. It's like seeing what true evil looks like... :(

Jenny said...

I found this book one of the most fascinating I've read on mothering. The mother gives up her career and her life to care for this child and he just doesn't give her the goods - there is no return for her efforts. In fact her life is destroyed by him. I think it captures the enormous sacrifice that parenting is. And especially mothering, if you find yourself doing a lot of it on your own - only Kevin's mother really saw him for all he was. We have a belief in many circles that if we just plug in all the right things into our children we will have a positive outcome - and that's just not how parenting works. I found it amazing that Lionel Shriver has never had children herself yet captured so amazingly the isolation and intensity of mothering. I haven't seen the movie - don't want to wreck my love of the book.