Wow, this was a pain to read. See, it wasn‘t even a bad book. The people who say they hated the story because it has no real meaning have never heard the term “unreliable narrator”. Because the book itself is not necessarily about the Lisbon girls, in my humble opinion. It’s about how a group of boys make the deaths of five sisters the bane of their very existence. We’ll never find out why exactly the sisters killed themselves, even though there are lots of clues (superstition, abuse, social isolation,…). But the group of boys that are the narrator of this book also don’t know and it drives them CRAZY. Lots of what I read shocked me into a state of pure disgust and yet…intrigue? The boys are so full of “love” for the girls that they break into their home, steal their stuff just to be close to them, keep their personal stuff even after their deaths and lowkey stalk them in their admiration. But here is the thing: The boys saw the Lisbon girls as otherworldly beings, as angels, destined for something great or tragic, but in all that they always seemed to forget that they are just….Girls? <b> “They were like Aeneas, who had gone down into the underworld, seen the dead and returned, weeping on the inside. Who knew what they were thinking or feeling?” </b> Here’s the thing though: Everyone wondered about them, but nobody actually cared about what they were thinking or feeling, because no one ever made the effort to talk to them. Everyone just watched them suffer in silence after the death of their sister, like a play that fascinated them. I remember the scene of the prom very vividly. The guys were so excited about going out with the Lisbon sisters, but when they were in the car with them and they saw that they were acting like normal girls, that put them off. And how Trip immediately lost interest in Lux after discovering that, in the end, she is just a normal human-being. Their obsession with the Lisbon girls dehumanized the sisters. In their admiration, they alienated them. The people in the town only saw them as victims, virgins, beauties, tragedies, witches, angels, outcasts,…but never as girls with dreams and thoughts and individual personalities that the society failed to help. This book is the <b> Renaissance of the Sad Girl Era </b>. The feeling of being misunderstood, not heard, not really human in the eyes of other people. That everyone seems to know you better than you know yourself. What the boys called love was never that - it was obsession. They were more interested in the mysteriousness and beauty of the girls than in the girls themselves. They didn’t even see them as individuals most of the time, because they couldn’t even tell the sisters apart, even though their features and manners were described as being completely unalike. Even in the end, the book was about the boys, not the girls. The narrator is obsessed about the role he played in their tragedy: <b> “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling.” </b> Or, to put it rudely: “How dare they commit suicide before we could bang them?”

Ich hatte während des Lesens oft das Gefühl, an etwas Teil zu haben, das mir nicht zugänglich sein sollte. Als ob ich etwas sehen würde, was ich nicht sehen sollte. Zudem fand ich es irritierend, dass über die Mädchen aus der Sicht der Jungen (dann erwachsene Männer) erzählt wird und die Mädchen sehr sexualisiert werden. Die oberflächliche Darstellung der Geschenisse und des Wesens der Schwestern resultiert aus der Perspektive, dieses von außen, durch quasi Fremde Betrachtende, welches mich mit einem recht unwohlen Gefühl zurückgelassen hat. Aber vielleicht wollte der Autor auch, dass man sich so fühlt.

*3,5*

This book feels like a written documentary about five sisters that are so important that a whole bunch of town boys reminisce their deaths even years after it happened. How can you miss someone that you couldn’t even tell apart?

I always wanted to read this book but honestly just because I really liked the cover of it, which is also why I bought it. It‘s about the neighbor boys from the Lisbon girls who all 5 killed themselves. How they handle and experienced it all. But not only that but also how the community, neighborhood and everyone experienced it. Honestly the writing from the author is amazing. I loved his writing style a lot but sadly the story itself just wasn‘t for me. I know this topic is a hard one but somehow I just couldn‘t get into the book at all. I still think writing about suicide is important but for me this just wasn‘t it. I might give another book of his a try since I really enjoyed his writing. Maybe I also had too high expectations for this one, but again I had to really force myself to finish it. Which is also why it took me so long to finally finish it at the end.