** spoiler alert ** While the subject matter may be considered controversial and upsetting, Eugenides crafts his story in such a beautiful and poetic way as to soften the blow of teenage girls taking their own lives.
Of course many readers may already be familiar with the movie (which, while visually pleasing, cannot hold a candle to the book) and the tragic story of the sisters, Eugenides plays with the concept of the readers knowledge in telling us the sisters' fate within the first sentence of the book. Though we know what happens, we are still somehow surprised when it does, through his tactical use of language and bluntness to describe the death scenes. Eugenides stealthily partners blunt descriptions of fence-post impaled bodies and stomachs swollen with pills alongside beautiful descriptions of dress material fluttering in the wind right before the fall, or the few moments of extreme clarity and calm right before the brain registers death that somehow coat the suicides in ways that readers are better equipped to experience.
The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous neighbor boy, who along with several of his friends, had become obsessed with the elusive melancholy of the Lisbon sisters, watching them from afar as their stories unfold. Their sense of fascinated confusion and wonder at these sisters all the more encourages the reader to attempt to debunk their sad and mysteriously painful desires for an end.