Book Review : The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Feeling a tad bit rusty on revisiting my blog exactly a year later. Forgetting your login credentials is a big enough indicator to how long I have been away. 

Trust me when I say I am reading great books and as the year progressed I found myself gravitating towards feminine themes, female characters, female authors and everything that came with that package. It was exciting! 

After 23 years of its existence, Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides finds it way in my  GoodReads Challenge last year.  The fact that this review is way overdue is epically understated. It took me a while before I latched onto the play in the book title but let's just begin by acknowledging a glaring fact; Eugenides knows prose. He lets literature carry on this grim subject with poignancy in this gut-wrenching and heartbreaking narrative of the Lisbon sisters. There is no room for mindless dilly dally nor any sympathetic romanticised idea of the tragedy that occurs.  

The book starts with death, teases you with the idea of young long, the kind that has sunflower fields, sunsets, power ballads and then all of sudden, in one swoop takes it all away. In all of that time, the five Lisbon sisters were forced to live a life they never wanted, find the kind of love that their families never understood and stay locked in like caged birds never to see the outside world again. The choice was obvious to them and with their actions, the impact last 20 years on the neighbourhood boys, the only people they remotely considered as friends.

It's sad, it's disturbing, its mesmerising. It's also only 250 pages. 

Honestly, it is indeed quite difficult to describe the way The Virgin Suicides makes you feel. How do you recommend a book on suicide to someone? Yet, this is one book that leaves you with a lull and a want to read more it. After the tragedy occurs, the book does impart the idea that the Lisbon family fogged and disappeared little by little before the all eventually vanished with no trace.

Aside from the suicides, Eugenidies subtle commentary on the sleepy oblivious town and the marred memories of the neighboorhood boys are worth note. How does no one see the Lisbon's sister isolation as a plea for help? How does no one reach out to them with a second chance at life? A counter-argument would say how is it fair to the rest of the town, the schools and their lovers to proceed with their lives with all the trauma that left deep dents for years to come.

“In the end, we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name." 

This quote from the book sums it up accurately.

 If I was to take a highlighter to choose all of my favourite lines in this book, I would probably end up with neon pages. Every single sentence is well constructed and supported by strong theories to thoughts being delivered here. Sofia Coppola does a smashing job on the film as well. The AIR's soundtrack is one of my favourite albums till date. 

This book is by far unbeatable on the subject of suicide and I can't wait to re-read it again.

Overall Rating: 5/5

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Book Review: Learning to Live Again by Dori Lavelle

Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one.

Okay, so it has been years since I read something romantic like the series I am about to review.
Do you remember in your school days, when you'd be ill in bed, reading Mills & Boon. Yup, nostalgia hit me pretty much right in the face.
  Since this is a trilogy, I will divide my review in three parts within the same post.

Book 1 - To Live Again

Read on: Kindle

Pages: 93

Goodreads Rating: 3.97/5

Review: Kelsey moves to a quant little Irish town to start her life afresh. Little does she know, that her next door neighbor is this elusive and handsome stranger that might make her a hot mess (Literally!). And that's where it all goes tumbling.

Considering that the series are fairly short, It was a good break for me to get into something moving that my regular reading challenge which you'll know I'm doing poorly at if you follow me on Goodreads. I didn't have an issue with the pacing of the book, however I did feel that for a keeper of secrets and supposedly being so discreet, Shaun was more forthright and oncoming than Kelsey herself. I expected Shaun's past to have a huge looming shadow on his personality, someone majorly flawed yet irresistible.
Maeve is a local girl who befriends Kelsey and is often her go-to person when she has to endure Shaun's hot and cold moods. Thankfully, Maeve isn't a typically shallow girl, she gets straight to the point without hesitation. She's probably my favorite character in the whole lot.


Book 2 - To Love Again

Read on: Kindle

Pages: 101

Goodreads Rating: 4.42/5

Review: After striking a 'deal' with Shaun and assuming the fact that she can handle the situation well, Kelsey tries to flout in and out of Shaun's life, hoping for him to still open up to her despite the adversities.

This one was my favorite in the series. We get a good look into Shaun's past and the darkness that lures in it. His first wife, Carmen is such a prominent character. The incidents that ruin her life keep following building up her trauma. Shaun tries his best to do as he can but he kind of has a clue as to where it would all lead to. Carmen's actions are justifiable in their own way and the consequences endured by the one left behind, i.e. Shaun, was expected. Their story is well detailed and narrated. Again, like I mentioned before, all that Shaun had to deal with should have left him all the more scarred, something I had a hard time believing in the first installment of the series.


Book 3 - To Breathe Again

Read on: Kindle

Pages: 101

Goodreads Rating: 4.68/5

Review: The final book was a bit of a let down because it was so rushed. The point of Serendipity's anger towards Kelsey, Carmen's family's hostility and the scenes that follow were expected but not in such a predictable way. Kelsey's pain is heightened by her natural female instincts, she loves a man who may no be able to shed his past and she has to accept it as it is.
After paying homage to his first wife, Shaun tries to go through life with Kelsey realizing that he wants to be with her. He starts proposing to her, I say starts because he's done it twice already and continues to indulge in her which I found was a bit corny for a man who endured so much. It made me feel unsettled.
Instead if they had a quiet or solemn proposal or decision and ended on that not, then it would have been a perfectly natural ending. This would have been perfect so that there was be an unspoken reflection of all that they had gone through earlier and the seriousness of Shaun's decisions would come through. It would seem genuine to take it further with Kelsey.

Having read the series rather quickly, the author's style of writing is descriptive and witty. It's what make it so easy to read through and I thoroughly enjoyed those bits. Fair warning: this book does contain graphic adult content.


All in all, I enjoyed the wave of nostalgia it brought me. I would ideally recommend this to people on the go, who don't have much time to devote to reading since it's such a quick light read and ardent romance novel lovers.

Final Rating: 2.5/5

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Book Review : The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

Pages :  292

Read on : Kindle

Goodreads Rating : 3.16/5

Review:  It's been a while since I posted anything on the blog. Not something I intended to do on purpose but it happened. Shamelessly,I'm not apologizing because I loved every minute I was away. However I can only neglect my blog for so long without feeling guilty.

I read this book last year and I profoundly remember It taking me longer than usual to finish this. Also I guess I can safely call it my first magical realism adult book I ever read. The story is about a young girl discovering and exploring her ability to taste feelings/thoughts/emotions in food. It mostly revolves around her mother's never ending despair, depression and an affair. It's extremely uncomfortable knowing the pain and loneliness of her mother since these are things we otherwise wouldn't have noticed in real life.
I would have expected Rose Edelstein ( the protagonist) to have taken her talent and secret and be much more adventurous with it. Sadly, that doesn't happen. If anything, she gets fogged down by an even more complex character - her brother. There isn't much said about him as he is by himself an absent character that we learn is part of who he is, discreetly hinting that he may have had a special ability too. Although his ability was strange and eccentric, losing him almost felt like a death in the Edelstein family. No one, including him, ever knew of his whereabouts and the duration that he would be away for or if he would ever return.
This book made me reflect on a few things. I began staring at my mother while she did mundane house work trying to understand what she was feeling or thinking at that moment. I would be lying If I didn't admit I was glad not to know. Food that we consume thoughtlessly on the basis of flavour may have been a painful and even taxing for young Rose Edelstein. Not being able to fully understand and reason with her brother and his subsequent absence will leave you with heartache.
Apart from that, the book is rampantly vague with way too many lose ends that I personally felt is not encouraging enough for a reader to stay on till the very end. Unanswered questions are tricky. Some books are loved for that one hanging, benefit-of-doubt element but not when it is clouded with a dozen of them.
I wouldn't highly recommend this to a lot people. I would,however, mildly recommend it to an older audience with caution just so that we can discuss what they gathered from the story.

Final Rating: 3/5

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