The Lovely Bones

but there was something missing in it, for me. Instead, I liked the book enormously, but didn't necessarily enjoy it.Alice Sebold has done an amazing job with a first novel; you can tell she's been writing a long time, and it will be interesting to see her other works. Her style is very visual, and her words flow like poetry, until she wants you to sit up and take notice; and then she will write something so arresting, that you're not sure how you got around that corner. Heroine Susie Salmon has very few years on earth, and so even the small things about her life are featured in Sebold's beautiful prose:"I loved the way the burned-out flshcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed,.....When they were spent, I took the cubed four-corner flashbulbs and passed them from hand to hand until they cooled. ...I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it."Sebold took a visionary point of view, that of the dead girl, and utilized it to tell the story of a family in shambles following a single, telling act of violence. For me, it helped to explain why this seems to happen to families when violence shatters their worlds. In Mr. Harvey, Sebold's villain, a character so dark and fearful exists, that surely he must be played on film by the masterful Anthony Hopkins. There is a central passage in the novel, after the violence and the tone is set, and before a surprising twist near the end, where the novel breaks down, moves slowly, covers the same ground over and over. During this time, Susie is so passive and sad, that it makes it difficult to read on.But read on, I did, and was glad that I had. The Lovely Bones is a work to be experienced, not just read, and it deserves a wide following. I'm sure it will invoke a lot of passion, both pro and con, for the story, and, isn't that what great writing is all about.The Lovely Bones - a 2002 bestseller, and richly deserved.

Parts of Alice Sebold's story of murdered 14-year-old Susie Salmon, watching from heaven as her friends and family live out the life she never got to finish, felt so true they took my breath away.The author painted a sad and beautiful picture of Susie's plight. Though Susie is in heaven, where anything she wants is only a wish away, she cannot let go of earth. She feels cheated out of growing up and watches with both love and jealousy as her friends and family experience everything she never will.This portrait of Susie is the truest. The first three-quarters of the novel are so delicately beautiful they practically float. I found myself feeling a deep attachment to this child yanked away from her life in its midst and to her grieving family.But then the author took a strange, Stephen King-like turn. Sebold started letting Susie and her friends do things that shattered the believability of the world she had, up to that point, so elegantly described. I was so enamored of Susie -- and the world she lived in -- that I felt cheated by this violation of the rules. My eyes stopped gleaming with sad, quiet rapture. Instead, my brow wrinkled as I tried to figure out why the author was trying to destroy the novel I had grown to love.Maybe she was so fond of the characters by the end of the novel that she felt it only fair for everything to work out perfectly, I thought. Maybe she just had no idea how to end her story. Maybe she got very, very tired and didn't care anymore if her book made sense.Until I reached the last fourth of the book, I had sung its praises to everyone who would listen. But suddenly, as the novel disintegrated before my eyes, I felt almost angry. A great injustice was done to Susie. Certainly, we have to see Susie grow up in some way to feel that the novel is complete. But the way the author chose to do it blows the ethereal aura of the novel away like dream fog, and Susie emerges not as an adult, but as a merely fictional creation. Until then, Susie had been real.

Note: spoilers I have read through this novel more than once, and I can say it grows stronger each time. Millions of copies, a year and a half on the bestseller lists, and almost two thousand Amazon reviews later, The Lovely Bones keeps on going. What is it about this novel that has touched so many of us at this particular point in time? The aftermath of 9/11 has been put forth as one explanation, but while that might get a lot of people to open the book, it didn't get them to finish it. Susie Salmon is but the latest incarnation of a familiar figure in American literature - the youth who never gets sullied by having to grow up, somewhat like Holden Caulfield or Sylvia Plath. The unique twist here is that she gets to watch everyone else grow up and comment on that ... growing up in her own way, as she admits at the end of the book, reaching a final peace with herself on Earth as an absence others must bridge, becoming wise in a way that cannot be measured in years. As the New York Times admitted in its review, most readers would probably pass, sight unseen, on a first novel in which a 14-year-old murder victim watches her family from heaven. But Sebold almost makes it work for the whole 300+ pages. The only part that doesn't is the "Lazarus" scene with Ruth near the end. On its own terms, it works fine, but as even Sebold seems to realize it sort of violates the rules of contact between heaven and earth she's established throughout the novel ... everything else seems plausible, assuming of course that you believe in life after death, but then if the dead can not only briefly return to the world but inhabit the bodies of living in order to fulfill unrealized sexual agendas among other things (and let me say that Susie's decision to do that instead of finger Mr. Harvey and pass on where her body is buried actually does seem understandable), why doesn't this happen more often in the real world? Huh? That said, there's much to admire. It was deft to make this not the story of Susie's life told in flashback from beyond the grave a la Sunset Boulevard, or an accidental removal from life a la Here Comes Mr.Jordan/Heaven Can Wait/that Chris Rock version, but to make Susie's death and ascent to heaven the beginning of the story. I don't find Susie's heaven as insipid as some of the other reviewers seem to; isn't it supposed to be the point that a) it appeals primarily to Susie and b) it's, as in Heaven Can Wait, Defending your Life and other such narratives, but a prelude to the real, wider Heaven that Susie has moved on to at the end of the story? In fact, having grown up in a couple of leafy Northeastern suburbs myself I can say I know exactly where she's coming from. As the radiator woman sang in "Eraserhead," "in heaven, everything's fine ... you get yours and I get mine." The rereadings I mentioned above helped close a couple of plot holes that seem to have boggled other people here: how the police link Mr. Harvey to Susie (the fingerprints on the Coke bottle ... his they could have matched with the ones in the house; hers from her birth certificate). I don't think the police as depicted here were necessarily incompetent, just outfoxed by a serial killer with more practice committing the crimes. It also comes out as you reread just how subtly Sebold charts the changes in Susie, the way her tone moves from impatient teenager to beatific spirit over the course of the narrative, alternating those perspectives constantly as Susie recalls them from her present vantage point somewhere in the blue distance. I like how she creates a sense of omniscience by having Susie often refer in passing to the resolution of certain plot threads that otherwise haven't happened at that point in the story. This could have just been a puerile attempt to work through her rape experience and deal with her very real fear of death during that; instead she actually managed to write a novel that, in the end, works because all of us have someone we remember in our lives who never got to truly live into adulthood and/or maturity, who remains safely forever young, trapped, like the penguin in the epigraph, in a perfect world, beyond the touch of earthly years, and we'd like to know, just once, how they're doing there. Surprising that we haven't heard any word on the movie yet other than that Scotswoman supposedly working on the script. There's a lot here that could make a really great film in this particular genre ... let's hope they don't screw it up.

I live in the UK and received this book as a birthday present from my sister-in-law in Cincinnati. Not one I would have chosen for myself (and indeed it hasn't been released here yet), but having started, I needed to finish. I read it in just over 24hrs - it's easy to read and interesting/challenging/well written enough to have you turning the pages quite quickly. Here comes the 'but'... I felt left unsatisfied, wanting to understand a little bit more from each chapter and character. I can't tell whether the Author deliberately leaves us wondering: because neither Susie, nor her family and friends have all of the pieces to fit together; or whether the author didn't have the imagination to develop the characters further and in their own right. So, it's either a very clever portrayal of how bitty and unresolved our lives can be when such a tragic event takes place, or the Author isn't experienced enough in developing sympathetic and fully rounded characters. I'm inclined to believe the latter since the last few episodes take on an aura of soap-like nonsense - things are resolved - but not quite, and not in the way we'd expect - For example, Susie's occupation of her class-mate's body was a) not what I expected, and b) not used for the purposes I would have expected.Incidentally, reading the book took on a certain poignancy as, as I was reading the last few pages, news of the disappearance of two little 10 year old girls broke. A week later they still haven't been found and I am struck by comparisons of policing methods employed here/now and in the book. Were police officers really so lax in the 70's or were we all just more naive?The book is very well written and the Author certainly has a talent for using words. There are some inconsistencies, however, in particular in the tone and vocabulary used by Susie. At times she is a naive teenager, at others an articulate adult. On reflection, I can't help but wonder at the extent to which this novel is really a form of autobiographical catharsis. In summary, it is certainly an 'experience' but it is not a book to put towards the top of a summer reading list.

I had put off reading this book for some time. Don't delay. It's amazingly good. Favorite book and wonderful read.