I had heard great reviews about this book and I had been meaning to read it for a while, and yet I dd not enjoy it very much. I found it rather depressing throughout and I felt the ending was unsatisfactory. I was expecting some great revelation on how Susie's murderer was captured and the fact that he was hit by an icicle and fell into a ravine seemed ridiculous. I also didn't like the part where Susie somehow inhabits her friend's body so that she can lose her virginity to her highschool crush. After that it seemed like her life was then 'fulfilled' and she could finally be at peace. It just seemed shallow and just plain strange.I guess the only part that was somewhat interesting was the author's concept of heaven, how everyone's heaven is what makes them most happy and that you only share your heaven with other people who enjoy the same kinds of things. Even though this was thought provoking, the overall depressing mood and unfulfilling ending left me unsatisfied. ( )

I enjoyed this novel, but I can't say I was satisfied by it. The ending left a lot to be desired--it lacked the closure that I wanted. Still, it was a good read--the narration was well-written, and poignant at parts. I would definitely read another book by this author. ( )

The Lovely Bones was such a mesmorizing book I didn't want it to end. Skirting the borderlands between human reality and the imagined wonders of heaven, I felt I had been introduced to a world both startingly tangible yet ethereal all the same. Since then, I have been looking for further excursions into the afterworld, but I haven't found much, until now.
Recently I read Gita Nazareth's Forgiving Ararat. This book too explores the interconnections between the land of the living and the land of the dead. As a publicist and a fan of this book, I'm interested to see what parallels are drawn between the two. ( )

A book that gives me hope that someone's spirit stays after they have passed. ( )

This is a book I will likely read again as I think the place my life is now is just the wrong one for being able to appreciate this book. I didn't love it, didn't hate it. ( )

Ultimately, The Lovely Bones wound up on a very, very short pile in my room: books that remain eternally unfinished because they were so incredibly unengaging that really, all things considered, I'd prefer to be watching paint dry.

http://stuff-ive-read.blogspot.com/20... ( )

This has become one of my favorite books because of the unique perspective of the narrator. It is definitely hard to recommend to other people and make it sound enjoyable!

This book locks you in from the beginning. Susie Salmon is murdered by her own next door neighboor at the very start of the book. From then on the main point of view is from Susie, who is dead the whole time in the book. She watches her family grieve her death as well as try to hunt for Mr. Harvey, her terrible murderer. She followes her family members through grief and into the rest of their lives. It's a heart wrenching story of an innocent girl just trying to find peace and let her old life go. So many surprises, twists and turns. Good book!

It took me at least three months to start this book. So many people told me to read it and it came highly recommended. All in all, it was worth it. Well written, strong and heartbreaking, The Lovely Bones is a great thriller. I am curious to see if the movie holds up to the book. ( )

Fourteen year old Susie Salmon was murdered on one cold afternoon in 1973. Now watching over her family from her heaven Susie watches her family first struggle with her disappearance then eventually dealing with the fact that she was murdered. She sees the way her death affects her friends, her killer and her family all the while struggling to make herself appear to them and even succeeds at times. From her death to ten years later Susie narrates it all in the haunting voice of a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman.

The major motion picture version of The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, and Saoirse Ronan is scheduled for release on December 11, 2009 and I can’t wait. This was an amazing story yet I can’t seem to be able to picture how everything will play out on the big screen. It’ll be interesting to see how everything is done.

This is definitely different from anything I’ve read this year and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves contemporary fiction. ( )

This was my first Sebold book. To tell the truth I thought I was going to get one of the typical suspense books that I have read a hundred times before. This book however was very well written. I love how it was done from the dead persons point of view from heaven. The idea that our loved ones are actually watching us like we all hope they are at some point, and in a place that is everything you ever dreamed of, is very comforting. I know this is a fiction book, but it is one that for many reasons makes you think of all those you have ever lost, and then want to tell them they are always with you.
Please read this book with an open heart and and open mind, as it will touch you in a special way. ( )

I had high hopes about this one when I started it, but it just kept getting worse and worse. The whole second part, the denouement, just dragged on. I was just skimming it to get through by the end. ( )

I heard rave reviews of this book, and resisted reading it because of the sad subject. I finally did break down and read it, and it is a wonderful book and well worth reading.

The Lovely bones was a book just as haunting as it was mundane. When looking over the cover and reading the little one word reviews, "Mesmerizing," "Savagely beautiful," etc. I can't help but feel that while the books indeed held some of these moments, it had just as many bland moments.

The approach was interesting, a look at a family's life from the view of their murdered daughter, but overall I felt it came up short. While some times this made for a lovely picture, in the end I don't think it was as original as it set it out to be. All in all, still an enjoyable read. ( )

If I have trouble starting a book review, I normally just write down a list of thoughts and phrases that cross my mind while thinking back on what I've just read. For The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, it was more a list of words: Brutal. Sad. Uplifting. Family. Loss. Heaven. Rebirth.

This book is so many things, but what stands out the most to me is its originality. This is the story of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered by one of her neighbors in the 1970s. Susie narrates from heaven the story of her murder, her family and friends trying to cope with their loss, and her own journey through the afterlife. At the same time tragic, disturbing, and beautiful, Sebold creates an idea of what happens to those we've lost in an original voice.

I really enjoyed this novel. While it's not something I would normally pick up due to its subject matter, I'm glad I did. I actually had this on my To Be Read list before I knew about the movie, but the trailer I saw made me want to pick it up that much faster. Now, after having read it, I think they're going to need to change some major aspects of the book to make it a good movie. This is because there's little action in the second half of the book. Most of the cliff-hanger/page-turning aspects are in the first half. But even after most of the action is gone, you care about the characters enough that finishing the second half is easy. I wanted to know if the family could ever heal from such a tragic loss, and I wanted to know if Susie would get her wish.

4 out of 5 stars. Not my favorite book of the year, but definitely one worth reading. ( )

interesting approach to tell a story by havign the dead girl watch her family, but I could not completly connect with them and not all it made sense. Ending was kind of weak. ( )

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. ( )

In The Lovely Bones, Susie Salmon narrates her story from heaven. In 1973, at age fourteen, she was murdered by a neighbor. Susie talks about how it happened and how her family copes with her death. Her spirit stays around her family, friends and even her murderer. She watches as her loved ones deal with her death. She also follows her murderer as he disposes of her body and continues living his life.

I got my copy of The Lovely Bones last year for 25 cents at a library sale that I stumbled upon. Isn't that the way it always is? You find an amazing book when you least expect it. This was an emotional, heartwrenching read. I emersed myself into this book, I could not put it down. I even got teary eyed during certain parts, which is not something I tend to do while reading a book.

The storyline was moving and the characters were really well written. I liked the relationship between Susie and her older sister Lindsey, even after death the two sisters are entwined. I also liked Susie's view of her heaven and the way she describes it. She always lingers around her loved ones, never wanting to let them go. I found Susie and her fathers relationship to be very moving. The way her father feels guilt over her death and how he really never gets over it. Some of the passages describing thier relationship were among the most emotional in the book. Especially years after her death when he finally comes to terms with her never coming back home. ( )

Susie was murdered when she was fourteen years old. She's getting used to life in heaven while watching what's going on in the lives of the living.

I cannot believe how wonderful this is! If you only read one book or listen to one audiobook this year, it should be this one. ( )

There is an atmosphere to this book I have come across once before, it was a book called The Pilot's Wife. The stories are different but they both leave you feeling horror, pain, loss, and finally hope, you hope the truth is discovered, you hope that there is a way to move beyond the tragedy, you hope that there is a chance of happiness for these people after so much pain. This book will haunt you. ( )

After years of avoiding because of the distasteful premise, I listened to the Recorded Books version and was blown away by the strength of the dead narrator's voice and the vision of an amorphous Heaven.

Negatives: The last fifth of the book dragged and the "return" of the dead girl was too woo-woo.

The Recorded Books interview with Alice Sebold is worth a listen. She mentions that she has always been a bit morbid, "but in a FUN way..." ( )