Flicka

Shriver Dept: More recently, in So Much for That , Shriver trained her unflinching gaze on disease and that oxymoron, the American health-care system. There are scenes in the novel of a belligerent cancer patient, a messy suicide and Flicka, a teenage girl with a horrendous affliction and a f -you attitude, messing with her gastric feeding tube, that almost rival the shocking set pieces in Kevin . Flicka s father, channelling Shriver and us fellow cynics, is relieved to have been awarded a sullen, aggrieved, precociously misanthropic kid instead of the chirpy poster children in their orphan-diseases support group, according to Globe and Mail. But that quality a black, bone-dry gallows humour and her stubbornly amoral view of the human condition didn t serve Shriver well for an awfully long time. The now-celebrated Kevin was her seventh published novel. Her actual seventh novel, The New Republic , a satire of the media, terrorism, xenophobia and the cult of personality, finished in 1998, couldn t find a publisher and with the publication in 2003 of the harrowing and much talked about We Need To Talk About Kevin , which tackled not only a Columbine-type school massacre, but motherhood as we d never, or rarely, read about it before, Shriver won Britain s prestigious Orange Prize and a wide readership. I like wickedness, I like saying things you re not supposed to say, and I probably value the quality of humour over any other a quality that, in my opinion, is intrinsically amoral, Shriver told Bomb magazine in 2005. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.