The Lovely Bones a Story From Up Above

books:


	• The Lovely Bones: A Novel Alice Sebold Little, Brown and Company, 2002 - 328 pages average customer review:based on 2514 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Beautiful Book, in 1st Person

Written in the 1st person-present, it really takes you in the middle of the story. You see it, you feel it, it's such an engaging story.

The Lovely Bones a Story From Up Above

The Lovely Bones
By: Alice Seabold
352 Pages
Back Bay Books $13.99 (paperback)
(Young Adult)

By: Jessie Ann Bolash

Alice Seabold is trying to speak out to all of the rape victims in the world today. In The Lovely Bones she is showing how much rape can affect a family and many people close to the victim's family. She is also telling a fictional story based of the story of a girl that got raped and killed by the same man who raped Alice Seabold during her freshman year of college.
The author of The Lovely Bones lived though her horrible experience and is now married to author Glen David Gold. After being raped Alice went through difficult times with drugs and court battles. These horrific experiences that no one should ever have to endure motivated her to write about a rape that did not turn out as lucky as hers did. Today, Alice lives a close to normal life with her husband trying to forget about the unhappy memories that haunt her.
Even though the book is dark and not the happiest story ever written, Alice Seabold gets her message across clearly. She does this by letting Suzie Salmon, the girl that was raped, tell her story from heaven. In heaven Suzie watches her family and friends wonder and deal with her death. Suzie watches her family fall apart right before her eyes. Many victim's families have a hard time dealing with the question, Why her?
Many times in the book there is very detailed descriptions of people Suzie knew and now knows in heaven. If a person who likes having a picture painted in their mind down to the very last detail read this book they would love it. It paints mental images very well because the great detail. To other people who are looking for action every second, they may be bored for a little while. This is until the action comes. This book portrays a wonderful courageous story of a perfectly normal girl that had her life taken from her in a matter of minutes.

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A Very Touching, Unique Story

This book has a very original premise - the story being told by the child who had been murdered. It's very touching to see her watch as her family falls apart after her death, and to observe the progression as years pass. Not for everyone, but I couldn't put it down.

I actually liked The Almost Moon more

The Lovely Bones was the big novel that put Alice Sebold on the literary map. I read her next novel, The Almost Moon, first and loved it, though most people seemed to consider it a big disappointment following The Lovely Bones. Having finally gotten to reading The Lovely Bones, I really enjoyed it but missed some of the dark tone and ambiguity of The Almost Moon. While The Lovely Bones has a decidedly sinister premise, it felt very safe to me and I'm not surprised it was a huge success with book clubs. Sebold has some achingly beautiful descriptions in this book, and the mystery element of waiting for her killer to be discovered makes this a novel that will have you turning the pages almost as though it were a traditional detective novel. Two areas I was disappointed in: I thought the resolution of Mr. Harvey's character was too brief and seemed an inadequate form of justice, and I thought the climax and conclusion of the novel became too mystical and seemed too implausible, even in a book that stretches the limits of believability on occasion. I will definitely read more from Sebold.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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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