The story is told from the perspective of a group of juvenile teenage boys. Or their adult selfs, who tell the story in retrospect ... I´m not sure, it´s a little bit confusing. Nevertheless, I don´t like being forced to experience teenage boy feelings up close.

I´m not saying this is a bad book, but it´s clearly not for me and I don´t want to pick it up ever again. DNF at 28%

Can we use DNF books for our book bingo? Because this would be my pick for the ugly cover category.

I really enjoyed this book, the second Eugenides I have read this season, and I was glad I did not hear about the "twist" (for lack of a better word) in The Virgin Suicides. I am not sure how I avoided hearing about it considering the book is now over 20 years old and has been hanging just on the periphery of my reading life, I actually walked out on friends watching the movie in college but I was a stupid then and wanted to go get drunk instead of sitting around watching some movie with a group that has since become my closest friends.

It is not really a twist, and that explains why I never heard about it, when you've set out in the title the fact that five teenage girls are to commit suicide, everything else fades into the background. Eugenides sets us up for the hit, hiding the narrator in plain sight. He happens to be, well, whoever he is, but, as it starts, you get the feeling it could just as easily be written by Ms. Perl, Uncle Tucker, Peter Sissen or any of the others from the cast of small town busybodies that feel familiar in a way that makes me uncomfortable--much of this book makes me feel uncomfortable, but in the way it should, challenging the way I look at the world. As it moves on, however, the narrator starts to appear less a quiet observer and more a Humbert Humbert, the story itself being misshapen through his perspective and manipulated through his writing. It would be/will be interesting to read again, knowing the role the boys play in the end and watching for that dynamic, but I am happy I got to feel my way through the first reading deciding and then second guessing my feelings on certain characters, trying to guess how it all goes down, then being lulled, like the boys, into a shock.

Something in how we never quite see the girls clearly. The narrator insists his clutch know them better than the other townspeople and journalists, but we see the Lisbon girls through the narrators reaction, which is that of every adolescent boy. They are mysterious. The boys are very aware of the Lisbon girls' bodies down to odors and facial hair, and they are transfixed by them. The whole book they see  the girls the same way they did when Peter Sissen peeked around upstairs, enthralled by the ladies undergarments, makeup and Tampax, and in a demonstrable way, like Sissen, who grabbed the brassiere off the crucifix, they are, decades later, still swiping ephemera from the objects of their desires.

Actually the later collection, which we learn about first, is less weird seeming to be part of an investigation of the suicides. It is when we learn that the boys have already started a collection that I really started to question the narrator.

The Virgin Suicides will dump you right back into the hormonal throes of adolescent love, but it does  so in a way that gives it weight, that respects the pain and damage we can do even in our most foolish years and leaves out the nostalgia. 

I seriously cannot believe I forgot to do a December wrap-up, so here it is!

- Digital Fortress by Dan Brown 5/5 review 

- Spirit Bound (Vampire Academy #5) by Richelle Mead 4/5 

- Last Sacrifice (Vampire Academy #6) by Richelle Mead 4/5 review

- The Archived by (The Archived #1) Victoria Schwab 5/5 review

- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides 1/5 review

- Strings by Kat Green 4.75/5 review

If you want to check out my review of the books, just click on review. I read the Vampire Academy series on my ereader so that's why you don't see that series in the picture. 

At the moment I'm reading Origin (Lux #4) by Jennifer L. Armentrout, also on my ereader (am I the only one who read books on the ereader if the covers are ugly and you think like yea I'm not going to re-read them and the covers are ugly, so ereader it is! haha) and re-reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I read it last year and I loved it and we have to choose four classics for school, so now I'm re-reading and analysing it for that. :)

What books have you read in December? 

Summary:

The shocking thing about the five Lisbon sisters was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who now recall their shared adolescence: the brassiere draped over a crucifix belonging to the promiscuous Lux; the sisters' breathtaking appearance on the night of the dance; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched a family disintegrate and fragile lives disappear.

My opinion:

I honestly don't even know what to say. There was nothing about the story that I liked or that captivated me en honestly I didn't even finish it. I stopped reading it when I got almost halfway through the book, it was that boring. I wish Jeffrey would have written the story from the girls perspective and put the deads at the end of the book instead of the beginning (you know what happened with only reading the first page). I didn't care for the characters, there we just weird en pointless facts (like how many people killed themselves in the US. I'm like: why?!) and it was just so depressing reading it. 

Now I really do hope Middlesex is better than The Virgin Suicides! I heard some people dislike The Virgin Suicedes as well, but they really loved Middlesex so I still have hopes for that one. 

Have you read The Virgin Suicides and what's your opinion about it?