Reviews with content warning for Sexual violence - The Virgin Suicides

this book is just so tragic, the irony of telling a whole story encapsulating these girls’ lives when they truly didn’t know them at all. i remember first watching the movie when i was maybe 16 or 17 and writing it off. but when i rewatched it a year ago, despite being even further from the sisters’ ages than i originally was, i actually understood. reading the book somehow feels more real, seeing the story as it is without the added glitz of familiar celebrity faces, a bunch of made up stories constructed so that the boys could feel interesting and connected to the girls, as if they could even for a second understand what it felt like to be them.

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mgoodrick's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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neledeich's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

"We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

A group of neighbourhood boys grows obsessed with five sisters and recount their suicides. A fantastic portrayal of the delusional view society, especially teenage boys, has of women. They fetishize them and are convinced to know everything without ever properly having a conversation with them. They are beautiful things to the boys, but they're not actually interested in them and their thoughts, if the girls do show parts of a personality, such as in the ultimate act of suicide, the boys are utterly confused. How can a woman have such complex thoughts and feelings?

It also explores how suicide affects the surroundings and the entire community. Eugenides captures how isolated the girls were to the point where no one could bring them back anymore.

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nenac0's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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nenya's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I read this book as the start of manic hot girl summer (and also to celebrate the end of my reading slump) and while I read this relatively fast, I must say I expected it to be far more triggering and manic than it ended up being. And I‘m not gonna lie, I kind of wish it would have been, because I enjoy being creeped out by books - but this was pretty chill actually. I had expected the suicides to be skin crawlingly gore-y but instead they were two pages of slightly disturbing but heavily announced death. What I must say was really interesting though, was the narrative being told in first person plural and, in addition to that, unreliably - something I haven’t encountered before and really enjoyed, but even here, I feel like there was a lot more room for mystery and manipulation of the reader. However, it is most definitely not a bad book - I‘m just not sure whether I‘d like to re-read it one day.
(Oh also: there is the mention of the N-word which really threw me off, as well as casual racism and other problematic themes that were normalized in the novel and not addressed or seen as problematic by the narrators)

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jenny_librarian's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

2.5

This is a book about the patriarchal tendency of dehumanizing women. Which should be enough to tell you why I didn’t like it at all.

The writing itself is good, but that’s about the only redeeming quality to this book. The rest is just men being… well, men. I get what the author wanted to achieve with this, but why it needed to be written in this way is beyond me.

I keep hoping the next “classic” I read is going to be better, and I keep being disappointed because those “classics” were written by allocishet white men in a time women were seen as little more than property.

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