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, speaking to us from heaven. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. There are counsellors to help newcomers to adjust, and friends to room with. Everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it - except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth.

From heaven, Susie watches. She sees her happy suburban family implode after her death, as each member tries to come to terms with the terrible loss. 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. It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #599 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-06
• 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

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
'Sebold has given us a fantasy-fable of great authority, charm, and daring. She's a one-of-a-kind writer'

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

Very, Very Compelling
I loved this book. You simply must read it. Whether you ultimately like it or not though, it is a beautifully written analysis of what effect a sudden and vicious death has on those who remain behind. The grieving parents and troubled siblings, the need for revenge balanced with the need to move on... it is at once compelling, upsetting and extremely moving. For me, personally, the ending wasn't quite as great as the rest of the book, but that is just me. I have many friends who have read this and loved it completely. Read it!

Disappointing
I wanted to enjoy this book much more then I did. To start with, I found the first chapter off putting. The description of Susie's murder made me feel sick and in my opinion it was not necessary to actually dedicate a chapter to it. I understand that things like this unfortunately do happen, so reading about it is uncomparable to going through it, but I personally didn't think it needed to be described as it was. I can also see that the idea is maybe to bring home the horror of losing someone in this way, so we can esentially, almost feel what the family are going through as the chapters go on. However, I think it doesn't need to be described as it was to imagine the horror of rape and murder.
Other then that, I actually felt quite disappointed at Sebold's idea of heaven. The subject matter is depressing enough, so to have a heaven that is almost the same as earth just makes you want to give up altogether on reading any further. If Susie were able to watch and help her family, without heaven being described to us, and maybe being only suggested at, I would have enjoyed it more. The approach in the book took away the element of "wondering" what is beyond. There was also a personal counselor in Susie's heaven, who played almost no part in the story and is only mentioned at the beginning.
I was frustrated because it should have been much more then it was. I don't really know why but I just wasn't absorbed enough in the book and charachters to really "feel" the emotions. You would think that given the subject, it would be a very emotional story, but something about the way it was written and handled just took away any potential it had for that.
The last line of the book I just felt was patronising and I also think the murderer was about as stereotyped as you can get.
I did think there was something right in the book, and that was the fathers reaction to his daughters death. Obviously everybody would react differently to such an awful thing, and I can only guess, but in my opinion the fathers reaction was well handled. That was the only thing I did feel emotional over, especially in one part of the book when he reminices over the times he spent with his daughter.
Overall, the book left me feeling depressed. Sebold should have been able to use the story to create a sense of hope or comfort out of such a horrific thing but to me she evidently failed. I don't want to be left feeling depressed by the end of a book and having read the synopsis of her other books, I think they will have the same effect, so I am going to steer clear. One reveiwer of her latest book said they felt "disturbed for a long time" after reading the book. I don't see how that can be a good thing. Make up your own minds but I defintely wouldn't reccommend "The Lovely Bones".

Courtesy of Teens Read Too
THE LOVELY BONES will haunt you. This book tells the story of the most horrific thing a family could ever endure, the murder of a loved one, a child.

The child is 14-year-old Susie Salmon. We see the murder through her eyes, after she is killed. Susie narrates her story from heaven, a place like I'd not before imagined. Her heaven begins as her school playground. Slowly it grows to become more. Susie merely longs for something she misses from earth, and it appears, except, of course, the living. Although she can watch her loved ones, know what they are doing, thinking, and feeling, she cannot be with them, or they with her.

The book begins with the emotional, frightening, and vividly shown homicide. Through Susie's eyes, we understand how he tricked her. We feel her terror as we realize, with her, what's about to happen. Then the scene moves to another, equally heartbreaking moment, three days later when a neighbor's dog finds a body part.

You would think, at this point, that you wouldn't be able to read further, that you'd close the book and never reopen it. But you won't be able to. Like Susie, we want to know her family will be okay. We want to know the killer won't get away with it. The author, Alice Sebold, artfully forces you to read on.

Susie watches her friends whisper about her at school. She watches as her younger sister, Lindsey, hardens to stone. Her four-year-old brother, Buckley, is passed from neighbor to neighbor, having sleepovers, told his sister has just gone away for a bit. She listens to the detective, Len, tell her parents the inevitable, that they are now investigating her disappearance as a murder. Her family slowly begins to crumble and Susie can do nothing to help.

This sounds like a suffocating, depressing book, but as you read you'll feel encouraged as Susie's family begins to move on, never to forget, but to begin to live life without her. Buckley struggles to understand the meaning of forever. Susie's dad becomes obsessed with proving he's not crazy, that he's certain who killed his daughter. Susie's mom handles the stress by hiding from it. And Lindsey, known as the girl whose sister was murdered, strives to find herself again. She searches for love. And she takes a huge risk to help her dad flush out the killer.

The ending is incredibly sweet. Amazing as it may seem, you will feel Susie's joy as she lets go of those she's left behind. For me, the ending wasn't perfect, it left me wanting, but I imagine that was deliberate. Life itself is not perfect. But life has hope. And that's the feeling that will stay with you as you turn the last page. It's a memorable read, not for the faint of heart. Expect to feel. To fear, to cry, and, yes, to laugh. THE LOVELY BONES will touch the very core of your being. Alice Sebold has written beautifully of the ugliest scenario possible. Wow.

Reviewed by: Cana Rensberger