I'd have to say We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. It depicts a truly awful parenthood and every time you think it gets better, it never does. The writing style is quite difficult, but after having read it, I'd say that the way the narrator speaks is very fitting to the book so don't let that scare you off. It took me over a month to read this book because I needed to step away from it sometimes to take a breather. When I was done, I didn't quite know how I felt about it because, on the one hand, it was so disturbing, and on the other hand, it was so real (horrifyingly so). I read a few reviews on GoodReads which surprised me a lot. Many people have such a dislike for this book, but when I read the reviews they dislike it because of how well it does what it set out to do and that these people were so disturbed or hurt that they gave it a bad review - at least that is what it felt like to me.

There are many trigger warnings that apply to this book that I will leave out of this post to avoid any spoilers. I hope that the readers of this thread realize that many of these books will have a lot of trigger warnings and look these up if they feel the need to.

Some themes in this book are: parenthood, lost dreams, and troubled teens