Rating: 
Summary: A Great Find
Review: The Virgin Suicides is a great book. Once I started to read it I couldn't put it down. This is a beautiful and moving story about how suicide affects a family and a small town. WHile this book is not cheerful, it does have its funny moments and I would recommend that everyone read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Leaves more questions than answers
Review: I first read this book when it came out in 1993 and then reread it for my book group and found that I enjoyed this book just as much on the second go around.The novel is written in the voice of a nameless adolescent boy - a neighbor who has watched the Lisbon girls grow up and who is fascinated with them even years after they are gone. He speculates about their lives, their loves, their reasons for taking their own lives and yet he has no real answers. This book focuses on a year in the lives of the Lisbon girls and their families. A dark comedy about adolescent life in the suburbs and the years where girls become women and boys become men The Virgin Suicides is a beautifully written novel with many different undertones - some dark, some sweet and some richly filled with lust, melancholy, and the sweetness that is childhood that the reader feels as though he or she is there behind a dark window peering out across the street and wondering what the girls are thinking about each night as they get ready for bed. This is a wonderful book about life and it is a shame that the author has not written another book. It is also a shame that this beautifully written story will be translated to film since so much of the beauty is captured in the prose itself - it is very hard to see how this could be translated to the screen so enjoy it before you see the film.
Rating: 
Summary: Something missing--very unsatisfying
Review: After completing this book, I feel like I have gotten nothing from it. Who were the Libson girls? Who were their parents? Who were the boys? Maybe this is the point--nobody knows? But, if these boys spent so much time studying, watching, and worshiping these girls, wouldn't they know just a little bit more? I didn't buy any of it. A 13yo commits suicide, and the neighborhood and community abandons them? The rest of the girls kill themselves, and the neighbors act like they expected it? Huh? Maybe this is supposed to be symbolic of the demise of society, but it's not a society in which I live (lived)--or it's way too deep for me. And, a lot of the other stuff I just didn't buy. Girls running around in the middle of the night--but no one seeing them? The house is a prison, but Lex manages to find all sorts of men to have sex on the roof? How? By magic? I just feel like I never got any of the characters--they are all shadows. Maybe if I were a guy, I could have related to the behavior of the boys, but I don't think so. Their behavior stayed pretty shallow, and it is never explained why they had such a fascination for the Libson girs before the suicides, so you don't know why they do after either. I think this book would have been a lot better if there had been at least one subject--teen suicide, the demise of the neighborhood, male adolescence, disfunctional parents, media hype, family tragedy--anything and explored it fully instead of the snipits that left you wondering and wanting more.
Rating:
Summary: eerie, mesmerizing story of adolescence and tragedy
Review: When I found out Sophia Coppola's first film is an adaption of Eugenides' novel, I became curious and read the book. I'm glad I did. It's easy to become rapt in the narrator's recollection of the Lisbon sisters -- the girls who tantalized, tortured, befuddled, frustrated, and awed those around them. A strong sense of place and sensual detail draws the reader in; you virtually join the neighborhood boys and try to make sense of the girls and what becomes of them. This is a unique book, because it evokes Cather, Fitzgerald, and Salinger instead of the hokey Gen-X self-involvement of most '90s American fiction. I'm interested in seeing how Coppola translates the book into film. Read this book, and read Jamison's non-fiction study of youthful tragedy, "Night Falls Fast"; Jamison's examination of suicide, complete with real-life accounts, will augment the sadness -- and eerieness -- of Eugenides' tale.
Rating:
Summary: Better than "White Noise"
Review: The Virgin Suicides is a small and perfect diamond of a book, comparable in its way to Lolita or The Catcher in the Rye. Hilarious, eerie, and cunningly postmodern, it seems to have been thrust upon its author like a vision. Please read it.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: I am not a very good reviewer of books, but I read this book in one week. I thought it was pretty depressing at times, but funny as well. Yet that made this book wonderful to read and hard to put down. I also have the soundtrack to the movie by Air. It is good to listen to while reading this because it is dark, gloomy music.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful, heartwrenching.
Review: I picked up this book while waiting to see "Boys Don't Cry" and found it so engrossing that I couldn't concentrate on the movie. It hits all the right emotions, pains, and discord of bewildering adolescence. Moribund as it may be, Mr. Eugindes' novel rings true and reminds us of those frail years which make us into the adults we now are. It reminds us of how life is not only precious, but also precarious and deeper than it's face value.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: Although I almost felt guilty for diving so far into this book, I loved it. After reading it almost two years ago, I have since re-read it numerous times. Eugenides is an incredible writer, this book must have taken years to put together. The topic is so intruiging, and, somehow, Eugenides makes death a beautiful, sometimes necessary thing. The book is musical, it's a guaranteed stay up all night and finish book, I can't wait for the movie to come out, when released in the U.K. it got dazzling reviews, it's supposed to be VERY true to the novel. I must also recommend the soundtrack (produced completely by the band AIR)
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, mysterious, and melancholy
Review: Jeffrey Eugenides, in his novel "The Virgin Suicides," creates a portrait of the title characters--the Lisbon sisters who take their lives--so haunting, the reader is left thinking of them and their plight days after the last page is read. Through skillful narration, he lets his audience see them through a haze, through the eyes of boys across the street. In the book, the boys have grown into men, but are still mesmerized by the girls and their sad end. By novel's end, the reader doesn't really know the Lisbons nor their male admirers . . . but wants to.
Rating: 
Summary: A very smelly book
Review: I thought this was a beautifully written book, but the author concentrated so much on different foul odors that it took away some of the beauty of it for me. I could not read it without thinking of bad bodily smells, or the smells coming from the Lisbon house. The book made me think about why these girls commited suicide and I like the fact that the author never really tells you why so you can come to your own conclusions. My only other criticism was that I never really connected with the sisters, except for Lux, who seemed the be the focal point of the story. I am interested in seeing what the movie will be like.
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