a very haunting little twisted love story. The boys love girls they try desperately to have....

The book and movie are so different but the general theme is the same. ( )

Wow! Bizarre and Haunting are the words that come to mind on finishing The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides .
The story is set in 1970s Suburbia. The Virgin Suicides tells the story of the Lisbon family. Told through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who are obsessed with the five teenage sisters and they relate to the reader the tragic events that lead up the the suicides of the 5 Lisbon Girls.
I have been pondering how how to write this review for the past 24 hours as I had so many feelings while and after reading this novel. When I started reading this story I was intrigued by the Lisbon family and found it difficult to put this book down, my feelings then turned to frustration as I wanted to get to know the characters as individuals and found myself looking for information that was not there. I wanted so much more from this novel and perceived early on that author was just not going to give it to to me the easy way. I found the writing and prose excellent and really made this novel a pleasure to read.

I learned half ways through the novel that this book was about so much more than answers and found myself easily adapting to weirdness of the tale. I enjoyed the pace of the story and loved how the story was narrated in the first person plural by the neighbourhood boys and this is what made the novel so compelling for me.

I would love to have read this book as a book club read as it is the sort of book that would make excellent discussion. I think only in a group discussion would I finally find the answers I am looking for!

Would I recommend this novel to all of my friends. No! as this is one of those books that I think you should decide for yourself if you want to read. I will say it is not a depressing book but it is Bizarre and haunting. ( )

“Obviously, Doctor… you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

The Virgin Suicides is about the Lisbon sisters, who all take their lives over the course of one year. The novel is written in first-person plural from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths.

Set in Michigan during the 1970s, this book sheds light on mental illness in an age where not much was known. This is conveyed through the numerous theories doctors came up with to explain the suicides. One of these is the concept of catching suicidal thoughts like some kind of virus.

It also explores the impact of suicide on a community. I don’t think I’d recommend this book to a teenage girl as I think the author with his descriptive language romanticize suicide. I know the teenage version of me wouldn’t have seen the bigger picture of what the story is about. I would’ve focused on the dreamy images that Jeffrey Eugenides details. ( )

This book had two states to me.

State 1: ramblings that seemed kind of irrelevant and added nothing but boredom to my reading experience.

State 2: a brilliant portrayal of the male gaze through the eyes of anonymous unreliable narrators.

The parts that were good were brilliant, but in an uncomfortable way. Some of the ways the girls were described made me squirm a bit. Certain parts resonated deeply, and I'll probably be thinking about them for a long time.

But the most interesting part is how the story barely even feels about what the girls do. They're the main event, yet we hardly know anything about them. The entire book is what OTHER people on the outside think about them. It leads to a lot of the narration feeling pointless, but is also why the bits that work are genius. ( )

My only negative experience with this book was the many references to their bodies as if it really mattered (especially since the narrators seem to be grown men with wives recalling the body of a teenage girl), and what really made me laugh was how a vagina was described as a beast with fur and “otter insulation”. It didn’t ruin the story, but it lingered in my head even when watching the movie. But I know this infatuation is purposeful. It’s kind of the whole point. Besides that, I truly loved this.


some of my favorite quotes (probably everyone else’s too, I’m not very original):

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.”

“if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ feet and hands are doing.”

“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time”
( )