Rating: 
Summary: Yowtch, what a stunning book
Review: It could have been purely grisly and sensationalistic, based on a real incident, as it is. But Eugenides manages to create a stunning literary achievement in The Virgin Suicides. There are long passages of writing so lyrical it makes you forget about the underlying tragedy of the macabre story.
One my one, the daughters of the Lisbon family walk the road to suicide. But that's just the surface of this many-layered book. Read it, and get lost as this talented author explores universal themes of adolescence.
Rating:
Summary: Applause for The Virgin Suicides
Review: EXCELLENT! I really was not expecting to love the book as much as I did because I made the mistake of watching the movie first (the movie is horrible). (NEVER, EVER do that!!) Well, I must say that I was extremely taken from the first paragraph to the last. This novel moved me in a way that I haven't been in a long time and it left me with more than an afterthought...I can honestly say that this book was on my mind for DAYS after I finished it. Eugenides captures the hope and despair of the narrator superbly...he puts you RIGHT THERE with this group of boys as they lust and wonder over the doomed Lisbon girls until their ill-fated lives come to an end (and even after).
HIGHLY recommended!
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Summary: A simply mesmerizing debut novel
Review: Jeffrey Eugenides' first novel The Virgin Suicides is an almost surreal, haunting, wholly unforgettable work of literary art. It has an almost unmatched depth and resonance that penetrates deeply into the ephemeral layers of life and humanity. In company with the vaguely revealed narrator and his former childhood friends, the reader becomes a peeping tom spying on the five young ladies next door and developing an intense need to understand their innermost thoughts and feelings and to come to know what terrible forces lurking inside that increasingly deteriorating house could possibly lead each of them to take their own lives. There's no real mystery to this story, as the reader is told from the very first page that the five girls will all commit suicide; the heart of the novel lies in the search for answers that can never truly be forthcoming.The Lisbon girls - Cecilia (13), Lux (14), Bonnie (15), Mary (16), and Theresa (17) haunt every page of this novel; even as one reads about their lives during the tumultuous year in which all would commit suicide, one sees only ephemeral visions of what they could have been without any penetrating snapshots of their engaging in life in a literal sense. Cecilia, the youngest, is the first to go. Three weeks after slitting her wrists in an unsuccessful attempt to die, she leaves a party thrown for her own benefit and hurls herself from an upstairs window onto a picket fence. The neighborhood boys are there when it happens and thus feel an intense link to the lovely girls next door who die without ever really having lived. We hear their private conversations and speculations about the girls and witness their attempts to both penetrate the deadly gloom that soon wraps the house in a death shroud as well as to somehow save the girls from a fate seemingly forced upon them by destiny. While certain adolescent issues of a sexual nature meander through their thoughts, the image they cast of the girls is one of purity of a sort. Even Lux, the one sister who is far from virginal, comes across as some type of mystical being whose most sordid of acts seems less than unclean. All we learn about the tragic sisters comes from our narrator and his friends, boys whose fascination and surreal love for the girls never loses its hold on them in later adulthood. The images conveyed about the mysterious interior of the house and the complete and utter breakdown of the entire, tragic Lisbon family is filtered through their eyes. The Virgin Suicides really is a type of ghost story and as such can only be analyzed and pondered over without being "solved." Eugenides does seem to wander off into tangents on a couple of occasions, but by and large he builds this story up beautifully to its previously stated yet still tragically shocking ending. The novel gets under your skin and penetrates your very heart, leaving a very real emotional imprint on the reader's mind and soul. This is an exquisitely written masterpiece of a novel, lyrically gripping in its style and mesmerizing in its emotional impact.
Rating:
Summary: leaves you looking for answers that were never there!
Review: First off, I saw the movie first and I righ off the bat became obbsessed with The Virgin Suicides.During the period when i watched the film, I was able to realize somthing others could not.The character Cecilia I think is my twin.I am known to be weird yet even crazy around my school someone you would call a loner.I too even tried to slit my wrists.I wrote fan fiction from the virgin suicides and people were astonished how accurate it was, because I am Cecilia's age and I understaood how she felt and how those girls felt, surrounded by obsessive parents etc. So anyways here's the main plot of the novel,
Five sisters (Cecilia the youngest thirteen, Lux, fourteen, Bonnie, fifteen, Mary, sixteen, and Therese seventeen).All live in a quiet community in Michigan.They grow up in a very,very strict Cathloic house with very strict rules.(They are not allowed to go in cars only for specific reasons for example attending church).The girls attend a private cathloic school which their dad Mr.Lisbon is the math teacher.Meanwhile Mrs.Lisbon is a stay-at-home-mom because having five girls isn't very easy! The five girls slowly start to slip in what i would call deep depression because their being issolated by their parents' protection, the Girls really have no place to go but in their house. The girls baily were allowed ANY communication with any boy, and even at school they hardly spoke to anyone that was not in the Lisbon family.The first act that shakes the community up quote from the movie,"spread the posion in the air", was when cecilia slit her writs and was found in her bathroom in the tub.
The main question everyone asks is when cecilia when questioned,"what are you doing here hunny you're not even old enough to know how bad life is.", replies,"Obviously doctor,You've never been a thirteen year old girl." So as the story moves on and after cecilia's last attempt which she succeds by killing herself, one of the lisbin girls, misses her 11 PM curfuw,because her date left her on the field ,all alone, her mother completly out raged puts the remaning four girls locked up in the house, no communication what so ever outside,and takes them out of school, where the girls from October stay until June 18th the ann. of Cecilia's first attempt.
This is a very great book!I would recommend this to anyone well not anyone but if you can understand death then yes.
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Summary: One Family, Five Teenage Suicides
Review: Teenage life is always full of its ups and downs, but death is something that few teens deal with and even fewer must deal with the death of a sibling. Cecilia, the youngest of five girls, ended her life after her second attempt at death leaving her four sisters and her parents mourning. The quiet little 70's town remained shocked not only after the first attempt, but also even more after the completion of the young girls death. In The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugendies chooses the neighborhood kids who experienced this tragic case to narrate their tales of mischievous studies they did to find out as much as they could about the five Lisbon girls. After a year of prodding and poking, the neighborhood kids were just as close as they would ever be, hoping to help free the four remaining girls from the dreadful life they lived inside the house. The kids were surprised to have made contact with the girls and were even more surprised to find out that while waiting in the Lisbon's house for the girls to finish packing to leave, the remaining for has also attempted suicide, one year after their youngest sisters first attempt. This thought provoking novel keeps the reader suspended until the last page. Every detail ever needed is told, and Jeffrey Eugendies writes this novel with a perfect picture painted in the reader's head.
Rating: 
Summary: Adolescent voyeurism
Review: The boys in this novel engage in a voyeuristic adolation of the five Lisbon sisters who live across the street from the main narrator. We are drawn into their obsession as they reveal detail after detail about the girls. Despite the seeming revelations the girls remain a mystery and as such continue to haunt the boys into their adulthood. The suicides have the effect of freezing the girls in their youth and consequently the boys can never satisfy their desire to know them other than through the bits and pieces of neighborhood gossip and remnants of the life they left behind which the boys continue to preserve as a shrine to their own unfullfilled youth.
The book is a testament of young hormonally driven obsession that is never satisfied and lingers into adulthood.
The girls are treated as the objects of that obsession and we only get glimpses of them on their way to their tragic ends.
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Summary: What Can I Say?
Review: I like reading books adapted into films or vice versa. And I normally prefer the films (Carrie by Stephen King, Johnny Mnemonic etc), but this time, I actually preferred the book! Well, kind of. I found it very hard to get into, as I did with the film, and only read the book for short bursts at a time, and then would do something else. It was quite descriptive, but not in a bad way, the way stuff was described you could feel yourself being drawn into the book. Sophia Coppola kept the film very close to the book, but thankfully, ommitted some of the more . . . tedious bits, shall we say. Although some bits I would have liked left in. The film focussed on Lux and the other guy, who's name I forget right now, while the book only touched briefly on it. I did enjoy this book and would definitely recommend it, whether you've seen the film or not. It's very thought provoking, to say the least. Oh, and strangely enough, the book goes on past when Mary, Therese, Lux and Bonnie kill themselves, which is quite interesting to read, to read the reactions - and (spoiler time), Mary actually survives in the book, for a wee while, and then kills herself.
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Summary: Obviously doctor, you've never been a thirteen year old girl
Review: These words were never truer when the admitting doctor asks Cecilia Lisbon "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." I was a store manager of a video store for five years. When the movie first came out, the title threw me. But I got the movie for free, and enjoyed it. After I read the book, I realized the movie TRULY does not do the book justice. The "Virgin Suicides" takes place in the seventies; a time that people look back on as perfect. The world was still saveable. But not for five girls. The Lisbon daughters. Every boy in the neighborhood was in love with them, yet could not fathom them. Up until the first suicide attempt, all the boys thought of them as one being. Only after, did they notice the differences. Cecilia, the dreamer; Lux, the over-stimulated one; Bonnie, the brain; Mary, the shy one; and Therese, the one who almost got away.The references to the house's despair and decay easily parallels the Lisbon family. In my opinion, "Suicides" is better than most other books in this genre out there: "Girl, Interrupted,""Foxfire," and the rest..I promise you won't be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: **
Review: The success of and reverence for this novel mystifies me. I thought it was half-baked, with no great psychological insight or originality, frankly, and, despite a lot of prententious writing (or perhaps because of it) found the narrator(s) to be, underneath all the "thinking," surprisingly unreflective. The boys seemed detached and cold. And a few incidents were strung over many pages. Also the "symbolism," the pagan metaphors and Catholic references, seemed contrived and geared to make the text seem "literary" rather than add genuine heft and depth to the story. Such things should be organic, and not placed in a narrative merely for the sake of giving it literary cachet.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting characters
Review: The book finishes in an inconclusive manner that only serves to reaffirm the obsession of the narrators. They finish delivering their exhibits, their evidence, and then they present the gist of their legalesque case to the readers. We aren't asked to make any judgments, which is odd when compared to most other works from the literary canon. It doesn't feel like we are even expected to make a judgment. This, hand in hand with the narrators' obsession, lends that they are too (collectively) inward-looking to request or accept our judgment. If, and I can't remember from the syllabus, we have to write a thesis, that would be it. The Virgin Suicides, for another reason, is a literary anomaly in that the book is mostly given away by the title. The exception to that, of course, is that Lux is not technically a virgin. Furthermore, two-fifths of the text is summarized in the first line. This makes the book more a book of 'why' and 'how' than of 'what'. In _A Confederacy of Dunces_ by J.K. Toole, we meet a funny-looking man in a ridiculous getup in the French Quarter, and go on to learn more and more about him through the book. In T.V.S. we find at the beginning that the girls are all dead. The only way Eugenides could have kept this interesting is that he peppered the book with the general lack of character development of the girls. This is possible only because the people the girls were were not the things of theirs the boys collected. Since the things that they do are then muted by their deaths, they seem static, locked in time. We don't know who they are or what they think. The girls are so passive, and Eugenides held together this notion, so that we feel for the girls (and still more so the boys' nostalgic obsession). Things happen to them, not the reverse; which is much more common in literature. The boys don't really have insights to them. I'm going to attempt to make an analogy, and I'm going to fail.
: : The boys have all of the two-dimensional pieces in place for the surface, but this is a three-dimensional puzzle, and their obsession is in that fundamental human trait to want what you cannot have, so they will never (and they know this in the end, and probably in the beginning as well) be able to reach the third dimension with their obsession since the girls are deeper than death. The only resolution made, besides that of the death of the girls, and thus the only real judgment we can make (though we weren't asked to make any) is that the boys are the ones who develop, and they develop into a deeper sort of pathetic melancholic obsession that most of us cannot identify with. That said, the book is, in a single word, chilling - more so than any of the other emotions tagged to it.
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