"The Virgin Suicides falls into a category of books that are beloved by women who love to dress up the feeling of violent sickness in pink ribbons and lace- a popular category in a surge of books with so-called "sad girl" protagonists. I was fully ready to go into my review guns blazing and no mercy, but towards the end I hesitated when I realized that the crux of the lessons to be learned rested on the unreliable narrators of the tale of aforementioned sad girls- teenage boys, aged into men who it seemed had progressed no further mentally than this fixed point of adolescence. While my biggest outright critique was the romanticization of suicide and the objectification of teenage girls, while viewed through the lens of the boys who cared for little else about them, this narrative makes perfect sense. (view spoiler)[ The girls are whittled down to the objects and fragments they leave behind, and what is mourned is not their physical loss, in the end, but that they never returned or acknowledged the "love" that the boys felt for them at a distance, in obsessing over the people they imagined these girls to be. At times the boys' recollections of the girls are haunting in a way that creeps under the skin, perfectly eerie and dehumanizing. (hide spoiler)] I have a soft spot for narratives that hammer home the idea that the memory of the dead live on, but are warped beyond recognition by the recountings of the living, who can never speak directly for the deceased. This book showcases that wonderfully; an awful game of telephone that even at its source, can only grasp at an approximate truth.

I also tend to add bonus points to books that are pretty with their words; and though a sticky, sickly aura emanates from the narrative, the language is well spun, and I read it enthusiastically in a day.

At my harshest rating, a 3, but giving all benefit of the doubt, a 4."