The Virgin Suicides

Over spring break in beautiful Italia, I (re)read the first of Jeffrey Eugenides' two novels, The Virgin Suicides. What started as a vacation read transformed into an engaging and mysterious involvement in the Lisbon tragedies. I felt like one of the neighborhood boys, obsessively collecting evidence of the girls' lives. Sitting on a train which was speeding through the Italian countryside, I remembered the first time I read the novel about a year ago, on the bus to an EOE trip in J-Tree. Eugenides crafts a haunting mystery of the Lisbon family's demise, reflecting the mystery of coming of age, as well as that between dreaming teenage girls and lustful teenage boys.