Instruct: Classify a review as either positive or negative.
Query: Egocentric Musings of a Miserable Woman

Shriver's writing is beautiful. She can poignantly describe a mundane encounter and infuse meaning into what are otherwise simple situations. The question of what brings a child to assasinate his fellow students and teachers is one worth exploring. But the narrator of this story is his mother, an egocentric woman who muses for 470 pages about wanting and not wanting a child, having a difficult child, hating her child, hating her husband, both loving and hating her job. It's tedious. I stopped reading after 150 pages and skipped ahead to see where the book goes, but it was just a continuation of the same depressing diatribe. The characters don't change, grow, or provide insight into life. It's a shame that such talented writing was wasted on the composition of this book.