Book Review — The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The five Lisbon girls are impossibly beautiful angels, adored by the local boys, raised by an overbearing mother and a weak father in the affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in the summer of 1975. The historical context is important when reading the novel, and will explain some of the language and the attitudes. The premise of the book is very interesting, as is the perspective from which it's written: an unnamed neighbourhood boy, twenty years after the fact, recounting the events of that year. The blurb on the back of the book suggests the Lisbon girls top themselves one by one over the course of a year, but that isn't exactly correct. Hashtag no spoilers, though. I can't actually remember if I read this before I saw the Sofia Coppola adaptation. The two are so intrinsically entwined that I can't separate them. The book looks like the film's cinematography and sounds like Air; the French dream-pop band who scored the movie. You can read a hazy, sun-bleached quality in the…