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Courtney Young, January 3, 2012 (view all comments by Courtney Young)
An exquisite, beautifully written book, from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Middlesex. The narrators are a chorus of teenage boys and in love with the Lisbon sisters who commit suicide one by one. The prose is magnificent and takes us through the devastating deaths during one summer amidst the background of Michigan's deteriorating automobile industry. This book is not to be missed. Eugenides doesn't disappoint!
Chirpee, May 10, 2007 (view all comments by Chirpee)
I was in the middle of another book when I picked this one up and read a couple of pages. I immediatley dropped the other novel, and read the rest of this one within the next few hours. I enjoyed the writing style, and the fact that Eugenides could make me smile while discussing such depressing topics made me both love the book more, and wonder about myself a little. It's an entertaining book that also SAYS something, and I would recommend it to almost anyone.
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I am a member of a book club and "The Virgin Suicides" was a decission I never would take by myself to read _as this kind of stories make me creep. But I am grateful for having discovered Eugenides' clean and straight prose. The truth about the day-by-day hell those girls had to live makes you wonder not why they ended their lives, but how they could survive all those years before. Absolutely moving.
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christijensen, October 19, 2006 (view all comments by christijensen)
This is Eugenides rookie novel. Not necessarily the best-written book of all time, but the imagery is worth the time spent. Anyone who was a kid in the 70's-80's will absolutely be transported. Beautiful.
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Product details
256 pages
Warner Books -
English9780446670258
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Dianah,
Long before Jeffrey Eugenides gave us the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, he delivered this dark jewel of a novel. Set in small town America, this study of a broken family of suicidal sisters will shock you. It is so compelling, you will be absolutely hooked. Wonderful!
by Dianah
"Review"
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times,
"A piercing first novel...lyrical and portentous."
"Review"
by Newsweek,
"Deftly written and intricately imagined...sizzling."
"Review"
by Harpers Bazaar,
"Haunting...compelling...Eugenides creates an allegory so thought-provoking it leaves a profound, indelible impression."
"Review"
by Esquire,
"Weaves a sinuous spell...shot through with sneaky black humor...intoxicating."
"Review"
by The New York Times,
"Piercing....With its incantory prose, its fascination with teenage tragedy, and its preoccupation with memory and desire and loss...The Virgin Suicides insinuates itself into our minds as a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel."
"Review"
by John Hawkes,
"A rare first novel that ends wondrously, on a note of profoundest, most elegant grief."
"Review"
by Boston Globe,
"Displays a certain brilliance...Eugenides has a voice dreamy with mythology and a point of view carved from the poignancy of adolescence. The resulting sensibility is both elegant and quirky, and it infuses his first novel with a graceful, reasoned confidence....Wistful, gloomy, and chillingly funny at once...A fiercely antipastoral novel – one with a shocking, elegiac sadness hidden in the eaves."
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