Second Quarter Outside Reading Book Review

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Back Bay, 2004. Genre: Fiction

This story takes place in a small town where 14 year old, Susie, gets murdered by her creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Throughout the book, Susie lives in "her heaven" where she can live the life she wanted but can visit and see the lives of her family, friends, and the rest of the world. Her father alongside his wife and their friend who is a detective try to figure out the mysterious murder of their daughter and who and how they committed it. As the book goes on, you learn about the struggles of losing a loved one, the strengths it takes to solve a crime, and how life can go on even after a hardship interrupts your life.

"Deeply affecting...A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time." -Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times (Outside Back Cover)

Alice Sebold portrays Susie as your average teenage girl but adds more curiosity and love to life itself though hers was ended at such a young age. Her killer, Mr. Harvey is also a pedifile and a murderer. As Susie walks home from school, he catches her on her way and commits his horrific acts. Susie lives in what seems to be her heaven after she dies and can live alongside the people living on Earth.
From the books perspective, first person, you can view the thoughts and eyes of Susie and the horrible and confusing time she lived and the life after she died.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.” (p. 320)

I think The Lovely Bones is one of my new favorite book yet. Though there were some dry and dragged on parts, it is still one of the best books I've read and would recommend it to anyone. However, most of the book is sort of girly since its from a teenage girls point of view so it gives off the vibe of a girly highschooler. I also really enjoyed Alice Sebold's way of describing the scenes so vividly and dramatically but also realisticly. I liked this because these things really happen so she wanted more people to realize how awful rape and murder really are.