2003

I’m not exactly sure how to feel about this book. I fully admit that I bought it because I knew there was a movie coming out. It was on my extensive list of books to eventually read but seeing the movie advertisement just reminded me to get my ass in gear.

The Lovely Bones is about Susie Salmon who is raped and murdered by her neighbor at the age of fourteen. The story chronicles the experiences of her family after her death as Susie watches from heaven.

Since I’m so divided I’m going to separate this review into two lists: things I liked about the book and things that I didn’t like about the book. Let’s start with the things that I liked.

-This book is an exciting take on the grief that follows the death of a loved one and what happens after the soul leaves the body. Seeing things from Susie’s perspective was psychedelic. It didn’t let the reader forget that once someone dies they are still with you in one way or another. And I liked this idea.

-The story was emotionally gripping, which is what I expected from such a novel. I closed the book with mixed feelings of loss and hope.

-The first few chapters were excellent. The book starts off with a slap in the face. Susie is already dead and we get to read about how her assailant—Mr. Harvey—led her to untimely death. Subsequently, she describes her worried parents from her heaven, their fear that she might be dead, their hope that she might still be alive, and the police investigation that points heart-wrenchingly to the former. It’s really a punch in the stomach, and I mean this in the most positive way possible.

Now for the things that I found fault with. There are spoilers in this section. I’ll try to be as vague as possible in the introduction of each bullet but after that I’m going to get into specifics. So if you don’t want to be spoiled I would suggest that you either skim this section or skip it all together.

-First off, the character development. Or lack thereof. I never really got a feel for any of the people I was reading about besides surface stuff. Which is disappointing since a lot of the characters had so much potential. Not even Susie herself was completely fleshed out. There are three that left me especially let down.

a) Susie’s mother. After Susie’s death her method of coping is to escape. She doesn’t want to be a mother anymore so she takes off for—what was it? eight years?—and we hardly get anything but a few brief flashes of insight into her mind while she’s on the road. Her adventures aren’t fleshed out, and we don’t really know how she feels about leaving her family. It’s mentioned near the end that she doesn’t feel like she can call herself a mother to them anymore but her feelings during her time of abandonment aren’t ever explored.
b) Ruth. Why in the world is introduced as a lesbian? This aspect of her character is never explored throughout the novel. It’s mentioned twice, maybe three times, in the beginning and toward the middle and end I guess that she has suddenly converted to heterosexuality on a whim since she’s kissing Ray. In fact, it seems that she was never really a lesbian at all since at one point she mentions having a school girl crush on Hal Heckler. Besides her ambiguous sexuality, it seemed to me that she was given interesting aspects that were never fleshed out and that she was ultimately placed into the novel as a device for Susie in the end.
c) George Harvey. This is the big one. I’ve read about a lot of serial killers, real and fictional. And I love reading about serial killers since I like to delve into their psyche and see what makes them tick. What triggers their sort of twisted and psychotic behavior? George Harvey was not a believably interesting serial killer. He’s a bland guy that just happens to kill people. Others in the neighborhood mentioned that he is strange and stand-off-ish and he does have a certain way with words when it comes to being questioned by the cops (Jeffrey Dahmer, anyone?) but other than this, he didn’t strike me as a particularly terrifying/fascinating/convincing character.

And then there are others such as Ray and his mother, Lindsey, and Buckley, but I’m not going to get into them right now.

-Heaven. I mentioned that I liked Sebold’s concept earlier and I do. Honestly, I do. The problem is that I would have liked to see more of it. And not just that, the people in it. Two other people who frequent Susie’s heaven are mentioned—Holly and Franny—but they don’t add much to the book. Why not? They could have been great commentators on life or death or what it means to die or what it means to live or grieve of let go or love someone. Why aren’t their lives ever put into the spotlight?

And in this vein, I wanted to know more about the girls that Harvey killed. Susie meets them in heaven at one point but their meeting is hardly more than mentioned. I wanted their stories, and the stories of their families’ grief, and how they felt about life after death. Again, they could have provided amazing speculation on some of the themes in the book but their potential is never realized.

-The ending. This is probably my biggest problem. Besides my other complaints, it was going pretty well until I got to the last thirty or so pages. It was looking at about a four-star status. But as soon as Susie entered Ruth’s body my suspension of disbelief—and believe me, I hadn’t been suspending too much belief at this point—snapped. It just came out of nowhere.

Okay, so let’s pretend that it’s completely possible for a dead person to harness the body of a living person so that they can find closure on Earth. Strange things happen everyday, right? And I don’t know the ways of the universe so how am I supposed to know that something like this could never happen? I read on.

So Susie possesses Ruth’s body to complete her life ambition on Earth. Which is, for some reason, to have sex with Ray. I felt completely and utterly cheated reading this. How the hell is that any kind of resolution? It wasn’t just the apparent message that sex solves all problems that threw me out of the story. It was the fact that 1) she was raped before she was murdered and that didn’t seem to have any sort of repercussions with her and 2) she spent the entire book watching her family—especially her father—come to grips with her death and it doesn’t even occur to her to lead her family to her body and give them closure. No, the one most important thing about her return to Earth was to have sex with this guy.

And what’s more, the boy—Ray—not only believes that she is Susie but he seems to have no problem having sex with this dead girl possessing his friend’s body. With no thought or regard for the friend, I might add.

Final verdict: three stars. It could have been great but the characters and the ending left much to be desired. ( )

The protagonist narrates the story of her life, beginning with her murder.
Substance: Sebold evokes a clear and familiar setting (although I was born a decade earlier than the protagonist in a different state). She depicts a strong understanding of the lives of adolescents and of people undergoing traumatic loss.
Style: Sebold is descriptive but straight-forward, artful without being arty. ( )

I've had The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now. I knew I was going to enjoy the book but I just never got around to reading it. With the movie coming out this winter, I knew I wanted to get the book read first, and I'm very glad I did. I'm going to do my best not to spoil anything, but some of it can't be helped.

This is the second book I've read this year where the main character was dead. I don't think this will be a huge trend as the book has to be pretty well written for it to make sense. Fortunately, this book was. We are introduced to Susie Salmon as a living fourteen year old. Within a few pages, she is looking at earth from her Heaven and that's when we really get to know her and her family.

The book is not about solving the mystery of her death, we know who did it from the start. The story is about Susie's family and how they cope with her death. Without a body, her parents must find closure without proof. The author did an amazing job of making each character real. We get to follow the lives of both of her parents, her sister, her brother, her boyfriend, and a girl who was not yet a friend but became one even after Susie's death.

The Lovely Bones is a wonderful book and with Peter Jackson directing the movie, I think it will be great as well. I recommend that you all read this before seeing the movie. ( )

Interesting first half because of the shock value of the crime. Awful second half--a treacly, unimaginative description of what the author imagines the afterlife to be. Sebold tries to soften the blow of the terrible thing that happened by imagining the victim looking down on her family from heaven. ( )