The Lovely Bones

I wish that Amazon would let us give one book a year a sixth star to denote how special that book is; this is that book this year, this decade. This book is good, real good, Lonesome Dove good, Terms of Endearment good. This review has spoilers - don't read the review - just go read the book. Susie Salmon is, was, a fourteen year old girl who was raped, murdered, and dismembered just before Christmas 1973 - that is not a plot spoiler, it is the first sentence of the book. Susie is telling her story from her heaven - everyone has their own heaven. She tells the story of her murder; she watches her murderer; she watches her family and friends. This novel is the story of those people she watches and the effect that her death has on others. When someone asks Susie's mother what her daughter's name was she responds "'Susie', my mother said, bracing up under the weight of it a weight that she naively hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would only go on to hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her life." [p 3] We see these changes as they continue to have different effects on everyone she knew. Watching her parents she sees that "[f]or three nights he hadn't known how to touch my mother or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength."[p 16] A second story line is the search for Susie's killer - Mr Harvey - who for most of the novel is hiding in plain sight. Her father has suspicions but the police can not act on them, so Susie's sister breaks into the house trying to help. Here we see the two story lines weave together; identifying the killer might provide some closure: "She knew that our father had walked into the cornfield possessed by something that was creeping into her now. She had wanted to bring back clues he could use as rungs to climb back to her on, to anchor him with facts, to ballast his sentences to Len [police detective]. Instead she saw herself falling after him into a bottomless pit." [p 176]. The third story line is Susie's coming to grip with her heaven and how she can move on. "I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant.I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived... 'You can have that,' Franny [Susie's heaven advisor] said to me. 'Plenty of people do.' 'How to you make the switch?'I asked. 'It's not as easy as you might think' she said. 'You have to stop desiring certain answers.' 'I don't get it.' 'If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling.' she said, 'you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.' This seemed impossible to me." [p 116] She slowly learns to let go but is still connected "I could trace how one thing - my death - connected these images to a single source. Now one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was watching." [p 226] This magnificent novel takes a horrific murder and shows the pain and grief it causes and the changes it has on her family and her friends. In the final part of the novel we see if she can pull away in order to let her family grow and move on, without forgetting. How can the family move on without real closure on Susie's death? And we finally see the meaning of the title "the lovely bones" pulls it all together. We also watch her killer move on through his life. Susie tells her story in simple declarative statements - like a 14 year old girl; it is wonderful how rich a story of relationships and desire can be told through this mechanism. The author, Alice Sebold, was a rape victim in college and wrote about it in her book "Lucky" - the title is the term the detective used to explain that the rape could have been worse, the rapist normally killed his victims. So obviously this story has that layer of truth behind it. Are these family relations really what it is like when a young child is killed? I don't know; it seams true, but I don't know. I know three families - good college friends all - who have lost a child. I see the hardship from the outside but can't really imagine the difficulty in their lives; I can't come close to understanding it. But because of Ms Sebold's experience I don't think this novel is gratuitous - I can imagine it could be true - not real (factual), but true. That is the highest praise fiction can receive.

I was hesitant to by this book after reading the mixed reviews, but after reading it, I'm glad I went ahead with it. I understand some of the negative reviews for this book as there a few things I thought didn't really make sense - or at least were not described well - but I cannot argue with the writing. Sebold's writing is beautiful and fluid and truly a work of art. The great things about this book: Sebold does an amazing job of switching between heaven and earth. I also love that this book is told from the point of the deceased. It makes for an unusual narrator. Sebold tells a story of grief, tragedy and loss in a very real manner. Most works of fiction would paint the family as coming together and leaning on each other for strength, but in times of tragedy that doesn't always happen. Many families are torn apart by tragedy while they try to deal with it on an individual level. In short, Sebold creates a very real-world story. If you have ever lost someone close to you, despite the sad subject of this book, I think it actually gives you hope. Having lost my father, I found comfort in the narrator talking about watching her family from heaven. Sebold also does an excellent job of weaving characters into the story that may seem initially like they don't belong. Ruth, a girl the narrator didn't really know in real life becomes an important part of the story, as does Hal, the brother of the little sisters boyfriend, who in most books would just be a character mentioned in passing. Basically, the book goes way beyond the typical story of it's type and really gets into the complexity of what happens when someone is lost to a tragedy. The parts that maybe were not so great (SPOILERS): The initial crime scene was well thought out, but I kept wondering how the police never found it. If it was a hole as intricate as described, how was Mr. Harvey able to cover it up so easy? And how was he able to build it unnoticed in the first place? No one saw him out there? It would have taken a long time to make a hole that intricate. That part seemed a little to far fetched. The elbow - Mr. Harvey builds an elaborate underground mud bunker in the middle of a corn field in order to commit a murder, then he does an even better job of completely destroying any trace of it after the fact, yet he is so careless when disposing of the body he drops the girls arm and doesn't notice? That also seemed not to fit well with the rest of the story. The idea of the deceased being a narrator was one thing, but the part where Ruth and Susie change bodies for a while takes that part of the book for into the science fiction realm for me. I can believe in the deceased being in heaven as souls and being able to see the living, but changing bodies one day seems a bit far fetched. The scene in which this happens was beautifully written and sad, but it seems to sci-fi for my taste. The ending was not initially what I wanted, and I think most readers would agree. I think most wanted her actual body to be found and Mr. Harvey to face justice, but in the end, I actually came to not mind the ending. I think it was more of a message and a way to make people think and left a more lasting impression than if the story had been tied up in a neat little package. Afterall, there isn't always justice and the missing aren't always found. This book did away with the story book ending and I actually liked that.

Love this book over and over

Estoy súper contenta d e haber hecho caso a las recomendaciones acerca de este libro. Me ha. Encantado la manera en la que está escrito más que nada. Es un libro muy interesante y a la vez desgarrador. Siendo una persona de lagrima fácil he llorado con cada pagina imaginándome en la situación de cada uno de los personajes. ♥️♥️ Gracias a Alice sebold por esta increíble historia

Excellent

História pesada mas muito boa.

Ein melancholisches und dennoch schönes Buch. Ich mag solche "Geschichten" die sich um Familien drehen. Trotz seiner Tragik hat es einen befriedigenden und gerechten ausgang. Den Film habe ich zuerst im Kino gesehen und musste es einfach nachlesen. Es zeigt eine ganz andere Seite auf von einem schrecklichen Verbrechen, nämlich der Kindesentführung. Es zeigt die Sicht des Opfers, das Opfer gewinnt. Beim lesen vom Buch kommt ein gefühl des trostes auf. Ein sehr ungewöhnliches Buch.

I discovered this book by seeing the movie first. I loved the movie so much I knew I just had to read the book. I’m not ashamed to say I cried so much in both. Thank you Alice Sebold.