I think the distance from the girls made them seem more mysterious and added to the sense of foreboding that lasted the entire book. There’s a lot we don’t know about the girls but we can gather that Cecilia likely suffered from mental health issues and the other girls should have seen therapists. We don’t know what happened in their house when no one was there, either. Since the girls didn’t narrate, we don’t know what they thought or how the felt about the boys outside of their conjecture. Because of the collective narrative voice, none of the neighborhood boys had much of a role. The only real characters in the story were the Lisbon girls.

I thought this was a fascinating way to tell the story and I really enjoyed the investigative method the boys had of looking into the Lisbon suicides. The story is told from a collective point of view of the boys growing up in the same neighborhood who are attending school with the girls and see their lives from the outside. You know from the beginning that all of the Lisbon girls die by suicide, so that’s not ruining anything. This book was one of my favorites this year. It’s interesting to me that the summary says the book takes place in Detroit because I don’t remember it ever being stated but I recognized my city well enough from the description. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters―beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys―commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. Other books by Eugenides reviewed on this blog:

The virgin suïcides jeffrey