An Interesting Tale | The Lovely Bones

Unique and moving | The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold

books:


	• The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold Back Bay Books, 2004 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 2542 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A heart wrenching story, told in a beautiful way.

I was given this book by a friend to read not long after it was released and because of certain events in my life it was a very difficult read to say the least. It took me over a month to finish it, but once I did I told my friend she wasn't getting it back. It was passed around a group of friends and family and everyone had their chance to read it. I appreciate Alice Sebold attempting to write a book with such a difficult story and doing an wonderful job in the process.

An Interesting Tale

I really loved the book, the story and the characters. It was one of the most "realistic' set of characters I've read lately. Only reason it didn't get a 5th star was because the last 1/4 of the book seemed full of un-necessary fluff ... otherwise a great read. I think I'll read her first book now.

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Unique and moving

I find it incredible that a book concerning rape, murder, depression, and family disfunctionality could take such a sweet and innocent tone.

A young girl is kidnapped and killed, and spends the rest of the novel observing her grieving family and friends from the safe paradise of heaven.

Despite the fact that the narrator is actually dead, this is a book about life, all its various ups and downs and the nature of loss and love.

The story is complex and character-driven, and the writing is innocent and eloquent.

On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue." The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years like an episode of My So-Called Afterlife.Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family, and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on Earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow." Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish, and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons

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