Product Description

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet ..."The Lovely Bones" is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. 'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose ..."The Lovely Bones" is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing.' - "The Times". 'Moving and compelling ...It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you. I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed.' - Maggie O'Farrell, "Sunday Telegraph".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #642 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, 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. 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, Amazon.com

Review
'My name was Salmon, like the fish, first name, Susie I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer.'

Sebold's debut novel is strikingly unusual from the start - it's narrated by a dead 14-year old girl. After her brutal murder, Susie Salmon watches her family collapse from a gazebo in her own personal version of heaven. Though she can have whatever she wants merely by thinking about it, all she really wants is impossible: to be alive, and to reciprocate the love from her friends and family still on Earth. Despite the grim premise, this story is an affirmation of life over death and how the living need the dead to anchor themselves to this world. There are no obvious surprises or twists: Susie describes her grisly death at the hands of the neighbourhood loner, George Harvey, at the very beginning of the book. From above, she cannot bear to give up her watch over her kith and kin, even occasionally breaking through the Inbetween to contact them briefly. Her face flashes in the shards of broken glass, her soul flutters past fellow schoolgirl Ruth, her love for her mother follows her despite her inability to come to terms with her grief. Meanwhile, her kith and kin struggle to come to terms with the lack of closure regarding Susie's death. Her father Jack needs to find her killer and over the years the obsession becomes banal, a background detail, like his wife's growing distance. Lindsey, her sister, throws herself into her books and her boyfriend, and practises being hard. Buckley, her little brother who was never told precisely why Susie went away and is never coming back, learns to turn his heart to stone. During this Susie is in their thoughts, words and actions, not knowing she is watching them. Sebold's plain prose is spotted with humour, partly because of rather than in spite of the subject matter. Black-clad Ruth writes poetry with titles like 'In Pieces' and 'The Lip of the Grave'. Her romanticism of a girl she hardly knew follows her into her escape to New York, where she roams the streets of Manhattan writing down details of killed and raped girls in dark alleys and corners. She manages to weave a connection with Susie in a way that would be impossible had she been alive. The suspension of reality is essential throughout, but some questions linger regardless. How did Jack just know from looking at the green house that George Harvey was the killer? Indeed, how could Harvey elude the law for so long? But despite these and other petty niggling doubts, this is a timeless tale of love and loss. (Kirkus UK)

Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
'Painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief'

Customer Reviews

It was OK.
This was an easy read and held my attention long enough that it became a very fast one, too. I read, more or less, everything and anything, but The Lovely Bones wasn't one I was itching to read and probably wouldn't have been read at all if it hadn't been for all the hype and a bargain carboot buy. (Incidentally, you can tell which books are the result of media hype because of what you find at our local carboot. In my town, there is no book shop, but almost every box of books had a book by Dan Brown, Jody Picoult or Alice Sebold in.)

The story itself was OK, in a shrug, pull-a-face sort of way. I recommended it to my Mum, who loves these sorts of grim-reality books, and said she could keep it. So make what you will of that. At least, like some books I`ve read in the past, I don't feel like I've wasted my life reading it. I just feel a bit `meh' about the whole thing - disappointed perhaps. I mean, it began well, and the middle was juicy enough to keep me reading, but by the end, I was feeling unsatisfied and a little put out by the whole possession of Ruth and the whole Ray and Suzie incident.

It was just odd and jarring. I had never really felt that Ray and Suzie had this almighty connection going as was suggested, I thought it was more of a school crush then anything else; but then when Suzie fell into Ruth's body and all the rest that followed, it was then that everything just got all too weird for my liking. That's not to say that I don't like the fantastical, but the story had set certain rules in regard to what Suzie could and couldn't do. She could have everything she had ever desired in her heaven, but she would never be allowed to have contact with her family or those of the living until it was their time to pass over.

And then the author seemed to break her own rules and suddenly Suzie gets the thing she desired the most, Ray (which like I said, I didn`t even feel like she really did desire Ray all that much). Perhaps some foreshadowing would have helped here - or perhaps there was some and I just missed it! I mean, it was implied that Suzie could influence the living world (Mr Harvey dying by her choice of weapon, the garden in full bloom for Buckley etc) and that Ruth and Suzie shared a connection through dreams and such, but for Ruth to be possessed so suddenly, and without much explanation, was just plain odd for me and left a bit of an aftertaste.

From then on, it just felt like a very long epilogue.

The first year after Suzie's death was very well paced and when they held the impromptu memorial on the anniversary of Suzie's death, I felt that the story had reached a sort of pinnacle and that we had started on the last stretch to the end, but...it wasn`t ending. The following pages followed the events of the next eight years and became so sporadic that I began to wonder whether I was reading the same book I`d started. Like I said, there had been a steady pace before, but now years would pass and I was inundated with major life events - marriage, graduation, birth, possessions - in just a number of pages. It was an odd experience, here I was, impatient to finish after the Ruth incident, yet feeling rushed all the same.

But with all that said, there were something which kept me reading and I think it's because I enjoyed Sebold's writing so much - she has a very nice way with words. I felt her voice was genuine and there were some very nice descriptions. One in particular was the story of Jack and Abigail, and the stolen cup without the handle that was used as a makeshift ashtray after their first night together. It was these sorts of details that made the story warming and something the author is very good at.

The characterisation was a little hit and miss for me, and I thought there were far too many of them. There were times when I had to flick back to remember who they were and why they were in the story at all. Mr Derwitt for example. Hal?

I thought Jake, the father, was very insightful and I could feel all his pain and his frustrations. Lindsey and Samuel were, frankly, annoying. They seemed flat and unbelievably perfect, and naming their daughter Abigail Suzie made me cringe.

Overall, it was OK. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a easy read and then suggest that they don't read the end. It was definitely not deserving of all the hype.

I Have Never Disliked A Book More (spoilers, kind of)...
I was leant this book by a friend who said that despite the slightly dodgy ending I would like it. I took a look at all the reviews in the front cover and thought that if so many critics loved it it must have something good about it. I couldn't have been further wrong. In fact, this book goes to show how wrong public opinion can be.

First of all, the language used was so incredibly overly sentimental. I understand that Susie would miss her life, but she just came across as incredibly selfish almost wanting to prolong her family's grief. I had no sympathy for any of the characters apart from Susie's mother, because before she had children she had great plans for her life, but because of the expectations of women in the seventies (when the book was set) she felt she had to have children. And then just when she thought she might be able to go back to education she gets pregnant again. I, in fact, would have probably liked the book a tad more if when the mother had left she had stayed away. She had her own job, she had her own space. But she decides to stay once she returns. *rolls eyes*

The father was extremely annoying, just for the length of time that his grief went on for. I have no sympathy for people who live in the past, and therefore I couldn't have any sympathy for any of Susie's family members.

The book also broke with all bounds of logic. The notion of heaven was completely illogical, and the body swap (so to speak) near the end was extremely confusing because nowhere did it even hint at why it happened.

All in all, the book was a real let down. Considering I like depressing books, I should have liked this book, but by the end I wanted to throw it against the wall in my frustration (I would have done if it belonged to me).

Gentle accounts of heavy subjects
I was captivated as soon as I realised that the narrator of the tale is doing so from the spirit world, a refreshing perspective, and spoken through the mind of a child the descriptions of the mechanics of mortal and astral metaphysics are explained accurately and simply. There is great insight in this book, not only in respect of the above, but in the understanding of the mind of the serial killer and the tortured childhood that made him what he became. The stigma communities pour onto to those who are different in some way,(e.g. the Ellis boy), and the prejudices they hold is also touched upon, along with the gross misconception that those who appear polite, normal and act in a regular fashion must be inherently good people.
The tale is great but the greater depth is in what is written between the lines, the slights and references to things deeper and unsaid, and how the novel weaves fragments of information back to earlier references in a most elegant style.
Well worth reading, although I thought that the ending was incongruous as though the book had been hastily finished, or the final chapters replaced with a new "happy ending" so as to please the American mass market. This then, after a gripping and touching realistic account, made it seem less real, as life does not usually turn out to be that kind or tidy.
Overall it has become one of the books I will namecheck and recommend, and look forward to reading again: the true litmus of value!
Readers who enjoyed this may also be interested in the non-fiction classic "Testimony of Light" by Helen Greaves, as it narrates form a similar perspective, although is without any nasty bits!