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This is one of those books that is hard to recommend to someone, because when you try to describe the story, there's just no way to do it justice. To someone who hasn't read this, the plot would seem depressive and dark. But it isn't. Somehow Eugenides manages to stop it being dark and it's certainly not depressive. Man, can this guy write. The prose flows like poetry and his narrative captured me from page one and didn't let go. In fact, 3 days after finishing the book I'm still thinking about it.

We never know who is narrating. It could be one or more of a number of boys who lived in the same neighbourhood as the Lisbon girls. The narration is always 'We' instead of 'I' and the vagueness works well in this book because it gives a sense of how the lives and deaths of the Lisbon girls affected all of the boys who knew them and how, many years later, they are still haunted by this tragedy.

Knowing the ending of the book didn't spoil this for me at all. The story told by the boy(s) was such that I felt by the end of the book that I really knew the Lisbon girls even though, actually, no-one really knew them. The deaths, although expected, were no less shocking and I felt far more emotion than I thought I would do, given that knew it was coming.