Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

Las Virgenes Suicidas by Jeffrey Eugenides

51 reviews

withlivjones's review against another edition

challenging dark sad slow-paced

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

2.5

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The premise is intriguing and the prose is very well-written, but overall this book is just about a group of grown men looking back at and obsessing over five teenage girls who were very clearly suffering, and that made it very difficult to get through. 

Eugenides’ writing style is very poetic. His descriptions so vividly convey the setting of seventies suburbia, where everyone seems to know everyone else. The Lisbon house itself, and its gradual and inevitable decay that mirrors the decay of the family inside, is also very well described. The use of the first person plural pronoun “we” as the narrator is an interesting and bold choice but is excellently handled and gives a clear sense of the mob mentality of the neighbourhood boys (who later become men). While many of them are named and described as individuals, by using “we” they blend into a sort of homogenous group that parallels how they see the Lisbon sisters. 

However, the vivid descriptions take up the bulk of the novel to the extent that the story moves painfully slowly, to the point where I had been waiting for the rest of the suicides to occur for so long that I was almost relieved when they did. It even could have been cut down to an excellent short story, but as it is the prose is rather difficult to get through and there are so many unnecessary tangents where the timeline confusingly switches between past when the girls’ suicides happen and present when the now fully grown men are investigating them. Furthermore, the extent that these poor girls have been put on a pedestal by these men (who barely knew them, merely watched them from afar!) over years (decades, even) of morbid obsession made me deeply uncomfortable. It seems to romanticise their mental illnesses in a rather dangerous way. 

I can appreciate the fact that this book has some very well-written prose, but in the end is just wasn’t for me. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Self harm, Suicide, Blood, Child death, Confinement, Death, Drug use, Eating disorder, Alcohol, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, and Medical content

Moderate: Ableism, Pregnancy, Racial slurs, Racism, and Sexual content

Minor: Vomit

phillyhufflepunk's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.0

I cried...but not from sadness. I cried in frustration. This is one of the starkest tragedies ever written, told from the perspective of selfish, inane narrators - under the delusion that they are somehow a part of the story. With each new development, they...and the self-involved upper middle class d bags that they spawned from...fail the Lisbon girls. Over and over and over, the community has opportunity to step in, but they don't. As these boys chronicle the downward spiral of their Manic Pixie Dream Girls, they continuously miss the moments in which they actually could have saved them.

The boys literally run out of the house after finding one of the girls dead without checking on any of the others, in spite of the fact that they were there to save them in the first place AND that they were about to let Lux do one or all of them just 10 minutes earlier.

 The Lisbon Girls deserved better, and although the story would have been 10x better from their perspectives, I still rate it 4 stars because by hearing the story from a bunch of clueless middle aged men, who were clueless teenaged boys, you see just how ignored these girls felt when they were practically SCREAMING for help.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Blood, Chronic illness, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Toxic friendship, Suicide attempt, Self harm, Racism, Physical abuse, Pedophilia, Misogyny, Mental illness, Medical trauma, Medical content, Injury/Injury detail, Grief, Abandonment, Adult/minor relationship, Child death, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Suicidal thoughts, Stalking, Sexual content, Racial slurs, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Body horror, Child abuse, Classism, Eating disorder, Toxic relationship, and Suicide

antoniav's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide, Suicide attempt, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Body horror, and Death

Moderate: Confinement, Sexual content, and Mental illness

saoreads's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

4.5

Its gruesome details are described as prosaic and poetic, with the metaphorical lines humming along the monstrosity of taking one's own life. It gave statistical inputs and the relating aspects of typical boys' adolescence, making it literally impossible to forget their first loves. The voyeurism was in one point of view, yet with the other it was the same too, though the latter didn't get to live long. After years and decades of searching for the "why", it somehow led to a point of redundancy, evidence, bias, and notions agreeing with the deed itself. That growing up sucks and daydreaming is better. Life wasn't in their control, so they took matters into their own hands, though it spoke of unrelenting grief hanging to a thread and plenty of factors no one might've noted. The fact that the parent's way of putting up their children suffocated them, or it might have stemmed from a faulty gene (or so they say, and to the extremes of five of them all?), or they took religion in their own different interpretations, there are plenty of what ifs that arise. However, the decision made brought agony and awful influence to their surroundings. It's one to assess yet not to act upon.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide, Toxic relationship, Deadnaming, Confinement, Self harm, Suicide attempt, Vomit, Body horror, Child death, Gore, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Mental illness, Stalking, Death, Alcohol, Blood, and Suicidal thoughts

_eleanorgreen8_'s review against another edition

dark informative mysterious reflective slow-paced

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

3.75

This book was unlike any that I've ever read, and had a really interesting, atmospheric quality. The story of the Lisbon girls' suicides was told from the collective perspective of the boys who were weirdly infauated with them, and the immense detail of everyone's feelings was engaging. however, the book didn't have any chapters which made the whole thing feel like a very long and often confusing stream of consciousness. I also felt that most of the plot was just the boys observing the Lisbon girls, and not much happened expect at the very beginning and end of the book. overall, it was an interesting and unusual book, but felt very slow despite its length. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death and Suicide

Moderate: Sexual content, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Mental illness, and Suicide attempt

Minor: Blood, Confinement, and Domestic abuse

fancymcgee's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense 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? It's complicated

3.75

you know, i love to emphasize with female characters, but their mother was a villain. the story is told from the perspective of an outsider, but as you read you know something is happening inside those walls that you will never fully grasp. i also don’t love the language the boys use for the girls, but in the end when they realize that they truly didn’t know these girls and romantized people they never truly met, was good. first opening this book, i didn’t know that i would finish it, if i even wanted to. putting it down, i just feel hollow and angry. maybe that was the authors intent, to leave you feeling like even though you were essentially one of the boys looking in on this sad family, you would never understand what happened behind closed doors. can’t say i loved or hated this book. can’t even say i loved those girls, cause did we ever even know them? 
“daughters of the community” 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief, Misogyny, Death, Child death, Injury/Injury detail, Emotional abuse, Drug abuse, Adult/minor relationship, Medical content, Blood, Suicide attempt, Body horror, Self harm, Stalking, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Mental illness, and Medical trauma

Minor: Racial slurs

blueberryelf's review against another edition

slow-paced

2.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Death, Suicide attempt, Alcoholism, Child death, Cultural appropriation, Self harm, Suicide, Body horror, Child abuse, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, and Misogyny

kathleenjones's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Eating disorder, Death, Grief, Self harm, Emotional abuse, Suicide, Suicide attempt, Violence, Sexual content, Child death, Mental illness, Injury/Injury detail, Confinement, and Blood

Minor: Alcohol, Drug abuse, Racial slurs, and Alcoholism

grboph's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

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

4.0

It took me a while to get into this book, but I'm glad I read it. I gave it four stars because it was beautifully written and the story was very emotionally charged (I found myself wanting to save the Lisbon sisters and felt for both their struggle and the boys'). I also think the book had some very profound things to say about repression, mental illness, and suicide that I appreciated as someone who has struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts and lost a loved one to suicide. This is a book I can see myself re-reading at some point in the future and gaining something completely new out of it the second time around. However, I took a star off because the whole thing felt really male-gazey (both in the way the boys view the sisters and in the way Eugenides writes about them) and a lot of the pages felt like I might see photos of them on r/menwritingwomen. Because of this, it made the Lisbon sisters as characters seem a bit flat. I would really like to see a rewrite of the story done from the perspectives of the sisters since I feel this would make the story much deeper and more meaningful, as we would get to experience their feelings and the motivations that led to their deaths. (On the other hand, maybe the point of the story was that it was told from an outsider's perspective to focus on how the suicides affected both the people and the society surrounding them). In conclusion, this was a very good, although slow-paced book that could have been potentially made even better had it been written from a different perspective. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for something you can sort of just pick up and put down whenever, or anyone who likes stories with a lot of emotional depth to them.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Suicide, Child death, Confinement, Medical content, Mental illness, Self harm, and Suicide attempt

Moderate: Gore, Homophobia, Classism, Misogyny, Religious bigotry, Sexual content, Emotional abuse, Ableism, Racial slurs, Racism, Adult/minor relationship, Blood, Domestic abuse, Sexism, Pedophilia, Stalking, Suicidal thoughts, and Violence

Minor: Cursing and Toxic relationship

nenya's review against another edition

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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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide, Sexual content, Child death, Alcohol, Medical content, Gore, Suicide attempt, Self harm, Forced institutionalization, Confinement, and Stalking

Moderate: Sexual violence, Racial slurs, Rape, Pregnancy, Racism, and Injury/Injury detail