slow and frustrating; not worth the 50 cents I paid for it. ( )

"We gathered their possessions once more, everything we’d gotten hold of during our strange curatorship: Cecilia’s high-tops; Therese’s microscope; a jewelry box in which a strand of Mary’s dishwater-blond hair lay bedded on cotton; the photocopy of Cecilia’s laminated picture of the Virgin; one of Lux’s tube tops." An investigation into the possibility of martyrdom in the American suburbs of the mid 20th century - complete with precious relics, and inviting a lifetime of devotional study - though a bit too licentious for my taste. Curiously, the saintly acts here are an inversion of a caricature of the Catholic faith: “The Acts of the Saints, Acta Sanctorum, as the cheap tricks of modern cinema." Here instead the quotidian is the domain of miracles, as if Elijah were in the living room impassively watching television

But why so many girls? The multiplicity of those characters suggests the kafka-esque figure of three borders joined together at the beard. One might respond “first as tragedy, then as farce, [finally as revelation],” Though, if true, Eugenides does a disservice by making the completion of the acts seem inevitable. The investigations in chapter 4 and beyond, and the increasing decrepitude of the girls' circumstances are flawed aspects of the work. This kind of martyrdom consists in an act without a visible sign. ( )

Una narración muy fluida que la verdad me atrapó desde la primera página. Me encantó la forma en como se desarrolló la historia de la chicas y la inminente conclusión que te dicen desde el primer momento.
Lo único que no me gusta de Eugenides es que a veces se sumerge mucho en historias de personajes secundarios, los cuales no tiene nada de malo, pero se vuelve demasiado densa cosa que entorpece el hilo de la historia. Lo bueno es que estos lapsus con en situaciones puntuales y no abarca capítulos completos. ( )

Descriptive books without a plot are not my thing at all. However, sometimes the writing is so good that it's hard to stop once you've started. This is one of those books.

In essence, this is a tale of boys beginning to cope with the reality of, and desire for, girls. And it does this really well by centring the boys' attention on a family with five daughters. Unfortunately, along the way, the sisters kill themselves. This mixes things up somewhat.

The observations are marvellously drawn, and there is a lot of wry, sometimes dark, humour (not jokes mind); including the book's title.

I suspect that you need to be in the right frame of mind to read it. It's not a tale that is going to lead you from one thing to the next, or leave you panting for more. Nor does it easily split itself into chapters. It's one to spend an hour or two at a time with in another world.
( )

I'm not sure what this book is supposed to represent abstractly, but it does a great job of describing what it was like to be a teenager in the 1970s. Well, girls as seen through the eyes of boys. Squished into boxes and sorted into our roles as virgins or whores with very little nuance at all. The weight of hormones, societal expectations, peer pressure and the looming cloud of adulthood obscuring our dreams and fears.

This book was an eye-opener for me. I wish I'd read it earlier, like when I was a teenager, but of course it wasn't written then, so no. I wouldn't have understood all of the implications, but I think I would have loved the insight into teenage boys and their budding sexuality. It became clear to me that I didn't understand them any better than they understood me at that age.

Teenagers are selfish creatures underneath it all. They imitate and play act a lot. They don't understand their own motivations. It takes a lot more life experience to do that. The children in this book are perfect example. ( )