Honestly, I really wanted to fall in love with this. I've long been aware of its status as a cult classic and many people I know, as well as people I don't know but whose taste seems to correspond closely with mine, have professed to adore it. So I feel a bit uncomfortable about revealing that I disliked it - I'll admit, I have been guilty of judging people a bit if I see they've slated a book I really love, and this seems to be a book that has a lot of meaning for many readers - but, there you go, I can't help it.

I DO 'get' a lot of the things people love about the story - the hazy, filmic quality of the writing, the sense of indefinable loss and nostalgia for childhood, the effective use of first-person-plural narrative, the clever structure with the obsessive boys cataloguing every shred of information they can find about the Lisbon girls and collating it into a sort of testament. But I didn't get much enjoyment from reading it. The tone reminded me a lot - A LOT - of The Lovely Bones, which I also disliked, and I presume this book must have been a major infuence on Alice Sebold's style. Some of the descriptive language seemed identical(ly ridiculous), for example the inventory of items thrown out from the Lisbons' house including 'blankets sopped with the picnic of the girls' spilled sleep' - what?! I felt repulsed by a lot of it - the descriptions, the characters - and the general queasy atmosphere made me feel quite ill. I know this is probably a part of what some appreciate, but I couldn't get into it at all. With the narrators seeming so odd, and the Lisbon sisters so distanced from them through the way they are idolised and analysed, I didn't feel a connection with anyone or anything in the story.

Thinking about it, this also might be because the characters' everyday experiences were so completely removed from anything I remember about being a teenager, so I didn't find any of it to be something I could relate to either. I know you're not supposed to understand why the Lisbons killed themselves, but as someone who was severely depressed and at times suicidal at that age myself, it all rang so hollow to me and I couldn't shake the feeling that the book itself (as opposed to just the narrators) was romanticising suicide. This is particularly evident in a passage towards the end, discussing the girls attending a debutante party after the suicides: 'they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived - bound, in other words, for life.' So the Lisbons got the better end of the deal, I suppose, by escaping from this predestined boredom and misery early? I also couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to accept that ALL THESE MEN would remain so obsessed with the Lisbon girls for the rest of their lives - the bits about always thinking of Lux during sex, etc. Yes, it's believable that being a witness to the suicides of five young sisters would haunt them for a long time, but surely by middle age at least some of them would have moved past it? Surely they wouldn't still be continually fantasising about the early fumblings of a 14-year-old as grown men?! And if any of this is supposed to be at all romantic, I just found it downright weird. By the end I was so, so sick of their tedious obsession.

Not for me.