The Virgin Suicides

Rating:
Summary: But why?
Review: Yes, it's a good read; yes, you can read it in one sitting; yes, the details about life as an adolescent are fascinating but ... somehow this book just didn't hang well together (pun intended) for me. I really didn't feel much for the girls, so when the book ended, I thought: who cares? The boy who narrates never really gets inside the girls' minds, we never really know what went on in their rotting house or what lead to their tragic ends. It was as if we as readers were also watching from across the street, never getting any closer or deeper, and I found that frustrating.

Rating:
Summary: Vigin Suicides Still Haunts Me
Review: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is easily one of the best books I have ever read. It is a perfect example that reading doesn't have to be boring, and yes, some books do tell how life as a teen-ager really can be.

On the surface, it's a story about the five Lisbon sisters, who have many life problems. The youngest daughter, Cecilia, kills herself. The family then slowly deteriorates, leading up to the climax of the book.

The Lisbon girls live in a house with strict rules, leaving them separated from the rest of the town's teen-agers. This makes them their own best friends and mysterious to the rest of the town.

It is told through the eyes of the boys who live on the same block as these girls. They have an obsession with them and collect belongings the girls accidentally leave behind. The boys also share many fantasylike stories about the girls and what the inside of their house really looks like.

One of my favorite passages is after the boys found Cecilia's diary. This was after her suicide, which followed a failed attempt: "We know portions of the diary by heart now. After we got it up to Chase Buell's attic, we read portions out loud. We passed the diary around, fingering pages and looking anxiously for our names. Gradually, however, we learned that although Cecilia had stared at everybody all the time, she hadn't thought about any of us. Nor did she think about herself. The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego. The standard insecurities, laments, crushes and daydreams are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity."

Once I started reading this book, I found it hard to stop. It was written in such a compelling way that some of the passages still haunt me. Eugenides creates such a thought-provoking and intense story line that it makes you feel as if you are part of the outside world of the girls' lives.

Rating:
Summary: Iriskid gobsmacked!
Review: My good God...I bought the book less than 24 hours ago and have been absolutely encapsulated by it. This is the first book ive read in less than a day, why?, its completely masterful, a book of exceptional truth and clarity, merging parts of almost gothic eeriness and evil foreboding to areas of extreme romanticism and deep rooted anxieties of a global youth culture with no where left to turn. I think whats best about it is the way the Lisbon sisters continue to be shrouded in mystery even (and i think more so) after their deaths.
I seriously urge you to read this unbelievably creative and almost epitaph esqe book...chillingly dark and genuinly mind-blowing. Callum xxx

Rating:
Summary: Obsession, Lust, and Tragedy in the Suburbs
Review: This novel is set in suburban America, with middle-class families trying their best to create seemingly perfect lives for themselves. The story is told from the point of view of a group of neighborhood boys who are completely obsessed with the neighborhood's beautiful blonde Lisbon sisters. This novel creates a lot of mystery around the Lisbon girls, with such obsessively detailed accounts of the girls that it is almost fascinating to read. However, the detail becomes tiresome around the end of the novel when still no explanantion regarding the Lisbon's girls' suicides surface. So I would recommend readers to try this book out, and come up with their own theories as to why the girls commited suicide, because the author definitely does not clearly explain why...

Rating:
Summary: A Fine Combination of Shadows and Sidewise Glances
Review: It's hard to describe the effect this novel can have on a reader, as so much of the book is supposition and conjecture. We never learn as much as we could about the narrators or the Lisbon girls, but that is the essential heart of the story. How much do you know about your neighbors? Your classmates? Less a novel about five girls who commit suicide, this is a story of how people can become disconnected, and how a neighborhood can decay. Running through these themes is the saga of coming of age, both for the Lisbon girls and for the teenage boys who takes us through the sweet decay of the story. A work of uncommon depth and grace, this novel is essential reading from the heart of America.

Rating:
Summary: The virgin suicides
Review: This is an great book i couldent put it down. The storyline is amazing. It was written in a way that almost anyone could connect to one of the chacters. What the five Lisbon girls go through throughout the book is told so well that you can almost feal their pain. It's a book everyone should have read atleast once, and when your finished with the book rent the movie ;0)

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Bewildering
Review: It is a journey, from suburbia to the deepest chasms of the mind with a lyrical song of lost innocence somehow woven from beginning to end. My new favorite author, Jeffrey Eugenides succeeds in creating a point of view equal only to the uniqueness of adolescence in his first novel, The Virgin Suicides. His writing is comprised of the darkest of irony and the most touching examples of beauty that can only be found in innocence and tragedy. The Lisbon girls become irresistibly addictive, tearing across the page, tapping into the most suppressed desires of the reader, and still managing to remain beautiful, mysterious, and majestically luring. As a protection from these destructice girls, Eugenides brings to life five compelling boys, threatening to cross the line between boyhood and manhood in their search for answers to the Lisbon suicides. The emotions and confusion of these young boys span the greatest of all spectrums of life and death; and in the end, the reader recognizes that the boys are not merely telling a tale of a community torn apart by five suicides, but are actually telling a story of the lost innocence of five bewildering girls and five bewildered boys. I would recommend this book to any person who remembers what it is like to search for the answers to life as an uncertain teenager...to any person who has ever searched for an answer and realized, perhaps, there is no answer to find.

"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...with our thinning hair and soft bellies calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together." (The Virgin Suicides)

Rating:
Summary: The Best Book Ever
Review: I thought this book was the best book I have ever read (I have read many books). The way the author wrote was great. I felt like I was there watching this like a kid in the Lisbon girls neighborhood. I loved the book. It touched me alot.

Rating:
Summary: Great potential
Review: I was intrigued by the idea of this book, yet when I got to actually read it, I was disappointed. Eugenides has a charming style of writing but it wasn't enough to pull this story out. In fact, the story itself wasn't so bad but I feel it would've been much more effective if it'd been told from another point of view. The story lacked alot of forward motion and never really answered any of the central questions to the plot. I felt that the characters were left terribly shady and I couldn't care for them as much as I'd hoped.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Hugely disappointing. I expected more for the book. It was boring and not what I expected.