Summary:
The book follows a handful of boys as they observe the Lisbon girls, who live on their street. I think it's set sometime around the 60's, but it could be as late as the late 70's or early 80's even. The Lisbon girls are an enigma to the narrator and his friends, especially when they start killing themselves. It literally starts with the EMS showing up at the Lisbon house after the last girl kills herself, and then goes back to describe the rest.
Thoughts:
It's really rather boring to me, honestly. It's a love letter to the Lisbon girls. It feels like it's written by a man that's now fully grown, who saw the girls kill themselves when he was a child, maybe twelve or thirteen at most. The narrator never actually names himself, and doesn't ever say enough to describe exactly when or where this is set. I like to have an idea of when exactly a book takes place, and who's telling the story. Call me crazy. But I digress (a little).
The boys of the story are pretty much obsessed with the five Lisbon girls. The narrator talks about the first girl killing herself, and then spends the next hundred and fifty pages talking about the uproar of the town over it, and the decline of the house itself, and freakin' tree diseases. Bleh.
The layout of the book itself, too, is cumbersome. There are five chapters in the book. The third one alone is 92 pages. And between the first suicide and the second, third, and fourth, (which all happen on the same night in the story) there are 183 pages. There's only 249 pages in the book. The way the narrator tells the story, you think that another suicide is coming any second, if only he would stop talking about what the house looks like now, and then it all happens right at the end.
I really didn't like the book, and I can't imagine why someone would. I just found it incredibly boring. I got the book through Paperback Swap, and have been waiting for it for literally months. I'm now wishing I hadn't bothered with it, because it really wasn't worth the wait.
28 down, 22 to go!
Pages: 249
Genre: general fiction
Grade: D+
Would I Recommend?: No. Straight up.
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