🖤 This powerful, moving, horrifying story has stayed with me ever since I read then listened to it many years ago. Shriver takes on the harrowing subject of a school massacre by placing the reader in the home of its perpetrator and voicing the thoughts of his mother, Eva.

💜 Eva is a difficult and unreliable narrator. The book is a series of letters she pens to her estranged husband, and there is a constant sense of things unsaid. There is also the issue - alluded to by her - of only having one side of the story. Obviously traumatised and still living in the same home she did at the time of "Thursday", Eva writes, it seems, to try to process the events and, more pertinently, her role in them.

❤️️ The main thread to me was always the question of nature versus nurture, Was Kevin inherently evil? Or was that her perception of him? I tend to the side of nature. He certainly hits all three signs of the Macdonald triad, a common predictor of homicidal tendencies. And I say this with the qualification of having listened to the entire back catalogue of pretty much every true crime podcast so... you know... I'm a bit of an expert.

💚 If you are fascinated by the psychology of killers and listen to enough true crime podcasts to place you on a government blacklist, this is for you. But this is for anyone who has an interest in human nature. It's part of that rare class of books known as a "book club read".