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A review of The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

Debut novel, narrated by 14-year-old Susie, the victim of a brutal murder, who details her family's suffering in the aftermath of her death.

Reviewed by: Jennifer Santiago
About Jennifer Santiago

The Lovely Bones From the opening paragraph, this much-celebrated first novel promises to be extraordinary. "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973," offers Susie, the narrator. Cutting across a cornfield after school on a winter afternoon, Susie encounters Mr. Harvey, the seemingly innocuous bachelor neighbor whom everyone knows of but no one truly knows. He lures the curious teenager into an underground fortress of his own design. As Susie's curiosity wanes, her suspicions kick in, but Mr. Harvey has effectively blocked any means of escape. He brutally rapes and murders her, locks her body in a steel safe, and irretrievably deposits that safe in a sinkhole that serves as the local dump.

Susie finds herself in heaven, or her personal version of heaven, anyway. Susie's heaven resembles the high school she'd so longed to attend, but without teachers, classes, or textbooks. In her front yard is a gazebo, just like the one she'd always coveted in her neighbor's yard. Susie and her teenaged roommate are given their own duplex and an "intake counselor" named Franny to answer all their questions.

From this vantage point, Susie spends the next eight years watching those on earth torn apart by her disappearance and presumed death. What makes this novel truly extraordinary is the reality of the characters, their believable transformations, and the emotional rawness that the reader experiences right along with them. The senseless tragedy tears Susie's parents apart, forcing her father to be the rock for her younger brother and sister and sending her mother to seek solace in the arms of the emotionally damaged police detective working fruitlessly to find Susie's killer. Her sister Lindsey becomes branded as "the sister of the dead girl," while her brother Buckley, only four at the time of Susie's murder, forces himself to grow a heart of stone to deal with the death of his sister and the subsequent abandonment by their mother.

Susie also watches Ray Singh, her object of puppy love and the bearer of the one and only kiss Susie ever received in her short life, and his developing friendship with Ruth Connors, a poetic social outcast who becomes obsessed with Susie's life and death after seeing Susie's ghost fleeing the cornfield the night of the murder.

As time goes on, the wounds of Susie's loved ones deepen rather than heal, and Susie yearns from heaven for her family to know that she is there with them, watching them, helping them, rooting for them every step of the way. The novel delivers a beautiful and uplifting message to anyone who needs to believe that our dearly departed are always present in spirit, and that heaven does exist.

The characters are well-developed and believable, the prose is eloquent in its simplicity, and the concept is undeniably unique. All in all, The Lovely Bones stands up to the hype and is, in short, highly recommended.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Lovely Bones

Copyright © by Jennifer Santiago, 2002

Reviewed by Jennifer Santiago:
-- The Lovely Bones - by Alice Sebold
-- 30 Minute Meals - by Rachael Ray
-- Raising Blaze - by Debra Ginsberg
-- Backpack - by Emily Barr
-- You Are Not a Stranger Here - by Adam Haslett
-- Bookends - by Jane Green
-- A Confederacy of Dunces - by John Kennedy Toole
-- Ash Wednesday - by Ethan Hawke
-- All Saints' Day - by Brent Benoit
-- The Stepford Wives - by Ira Levin
-- The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating - by David M. Buss
-- Literary New Orleans - by Judy Long (Editor)
-- The Sopranos Family Cookbook - by Allen Rucker; Recipes by Michele Scicolone
-- Atonement - by Ian McEwan
-- The Crimson Petal and the White - by Michel Faber
-- Midnight Bayou - by Nora Roberts
-- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - by Ann Brashares
-- The Zygote Chronicles - by Suzanne Finnamore
-- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - by J.K. Rowling









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