Product Description

When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. This was before milk carton photos and public service announcements, she tells us; back in 1973, when Susie mysteriously disappeared, people still believed these things didn't happen. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and her own adjustment to the strange new place she finds herself. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. With love, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie watches her family as they cope with their grief, her father embarks on a search for the killer, her sister undertakes a feat of amazing daring, her little brother builds a fort in her honor and begin the difficult process of healing. In the hands of a brilliant novelist, this story of seemingly unbearable tragedy is transformed into a suspenseful and touching story about family, memory, love, heaven, and living.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7357 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Alice Sebold is the bestselling author ofThe Lovely BonesandLucky, A Memoir.She lives in California with her husband, the novelist Glen David Gold.

Customer Reviews

Those bones
They say that a ghost remains tied to the world of the living either to avenge its death or to comfort those left behind. The heroine of Alice Sebold's haunting, sweet novel "The Lovely Bones" isn't out for revenge, but her ties to the living family and friends make debut an amazing, uplifting story.

Susie Salmon is dead. On a day like any other, she was raped and brutally murdered by a seemingly harmless neighbor, who hacked up her body and buried it. Now she exists in a surprisingly simple and pleasant heaven, watching her family and friends after she vanished, and watching their lives unfold even after hers has ended.

Her parents cling to hope that even though a lot of blood and part of an arm has been found, that Susie is still alive. But eventually, they must give up hope. Susie watches the police investigate her death, while her father pokes around to find out whodunnit. And just as importantly her family and friends stumble through the various stages of grief, trying to deal with a horrible, senseless crime that has touched each of them.

When someone is kidnapped and/or murdered, the news usually focuses on the criminals and the gory details. Not much attention is given to the victims and the lives they once led, or how their loves ones are dealing with the tragedy. Other books would be self-conscious or miserable dealing with that kind of story, but "Lovely Bones" is something very different.

Instead, this book possesses a quiet, comforting tone and a poetic style, which sometimes gets bogged in its own detail, but is beautiful nonetheless. Sebold's writing has an innocent charm; one enchanting scene has Susie trying to make a flower bloom for her father, and filling a celestial room with flower petals instead.

The only really gritty scene is the rape-and-murder, which is all the more shocking when you realize that things like this happen in real life. And Sebold paints the characters' grief and shock with a light hand, so that it never feels sentimental. It has the hollow ache of real grief, transcribed with more skill than more authors can manage.

Susie herself is a truly unique character, a narrator completely removed from the events she describes, and yet so wrapped up in the people she loves, and has left behind. And Sebold explores the many characters as they go through the grieving process, with different thoughts and actions as they try to deal with it. The parents, the siblings, the teachers, and even the kid who was enamored of Susie.

Alice Sebold's "Lovely Bones" shocks you at the beginning, and spends the rest of the book drying your tears. Beautiful, enchanting, disturbing and very unique.

The moving story of a family forever changed, forever sorrowful...
One word adequately describes this amazing book: family. But we are not talking about the kind of family depicted in 1950's television shows or Norman Rockwell portraits. The Salmon family ("like the fish") in The Lovely Bones is authentic in every way: the mother feels trapped by her servile role as nurturer and housecleaner in suburban America in the late 1970s; the father is bored with his office job and lives for his evenings at home when he plays with his young son in the back yard or makes model ships in his study. The adolescent sister, Lindsey, is wrapped up in high school sports and her boyfriend. However, the Salmon family has a heavy cross to carry. Each member is trying to cope with an impossible situation- how to grieve the tragic death of a 14-year old daughter and sister, Susie.

It is the narrative voice that makes this novel so exquisitely beautiful and haunting. From her position in Heaven, the murdered family member, Susie, tells the story of her death at the hands of a serial killer, an eccentric neighbor who even the police do not suspect as the perpetrator. Susie observes her family's ongoing grief in the months and years following her death. As a spirit, she is able to crawl under the skin of her family members and actually feel their hidden thoughts and pain. She watches as her father mentally breaks down because he instinctively knows that his odd neighbor, Mr. Harvey, committed the crime and no one, including his wife and the local police, are willing to believe him due to lack of evidence. Susie sees how her mother emotionally closes up following the murder and attempts to dull the pain through adultery and eventual flight to California. She grows to respect her adolescent sister's noble strength as she watches her comfort her father and become a mother to their abandoned young brother.

Susie is not really in Heaven yet. She is in an in between place where souls apparently seek refuge after sudden and violent deaths. In this case, Susie is in a peaceful but lonely realm full of dogs, gazebos, and other young girls. She is still partly bound to earth and to her family. The chords that draw her to her parents and siblings are strong, and she is not yet willing to sever them. Her family is not willing to let go of her, either.

I cannot think of any book that I have ever read that tugged at my heart in this way, causing it to strain with sadness for the plight of the characters. As I read, my thoughts would wander to families that I have known or heard about who lost a child, perhaps through terminal illness or a tragic car accident. It is a lifelong trauma that leaves each family member forever changed, forever sorrowful.

Word has it that Peter Jackson, the brilliant director of Lord of the Rings, will be making this movie for Dream Works. Better bring a box of Kleenex to the theatre.

Why did the "The Lovely Bones" become a mega-bestseller?
On August 14, 2002, I attended an Alice Sebold reading. As an ex-journalist, I'm a cynic. Until that day, I had only read about five novels since 1978. Most fiction involves less research and "rules" than non-fiction.

Yet Sebold spent five years writing "The Lovely Bones." She didn't intend it to be a Great American Novel (awful cliché), a handbook about managing grief. Then astoundingly, it sold more than one million copies in less than two months. Why?

On May 8, 1981, Alice Sebold was raped, an incident that nearly destroyed her. She wrote an explicit, shocking and almost neglected book in 1999 called "Lucky." It was this knowledge, as a non-fiction reader, and not hype or current events, that drew me to "The Lovely Bones." You may not have to know this about Sebold. But if you do, what she writes in "The Lovely Bones" assumes credibility, even if you're shaking your head in bewilderment, having trouble believing what's in it.

"Hype" is a fashionably pessimistic word being used with excess to leverage what in my view are elitist comments against this book. "Hype" is a product of marketing with little relevance to quality. I agree with whomever said the following: People who give into "hype" expecting a seismic shift in their lives before turning to "page one," are doomed to disappointment. Hype doesn't give a book "legs." Word-of-mouth does.

Narrating from the dead, as Susie Salmon does in "The Lovely Bones," isn't new. In the shorthand of cinema, you can quickly point to "Sunset Boulevard (1950) and "American Beauty (1999)." She may seem wiser beyond her "years," but it isn't critical to separate adolescent vs. adult narration. "Real time" exists for the living. Susie's dead.

In "The Lovely Bones," the only thing that matters is what remains in memory. We question what we can't see, yet invisible things like oxygen, love, hate, lust, sorrow and hope are undeniable. After people die, we hear their voices, we remember their touch and the way they look. They're in the next room, watching TV, reading, whatever. Sebold captures our obsession, our "presence of mind" about the dead. This obviously resonates with people, many without the time to read 10 books per year. To denigrate fans of this book smacks of unnecessary snobbery that promotes literary "class distinctions." Conversely, sophisticated readers raise valid criticisms that wouldn't be as intense if they read the "NC-17" horrors of "Lucky."

Sebold creates an atmosphere absent of shrillness or clinically described violence. A "quick read" is not synonymous with shallowness. Expressing the intangible with sentences 10-25 words in length is near impossible. But Sebold's ability to impart abstract thoughts into simple sentences can't be dismissed. This is not a murder mystery. If it was, it'd be ordinary. This is an admittedly broad-brush story about family connections that pushes the thriller into the back seat. Splitting hairs about the plausibility of character motivations misses the big picture of "The Lovely Bones." It's not literature aspiring for greatness, filled with big words, tortuous sentences and the type of false profundities that wins awards. It's a book that achieves something greater for most writers -- a chance to weave a collection of universal themes -- through an accessible narrative that sophisticated readers as well as the greater body of people who have zero desire to read can appreciate.

Perhaps this is why disappointed readers keep using words like "overrated" or phrases like, "doesn't live up to the hype." They're comfortable with authors requiring more words leading toward a revelation that feels closer to irony and "truth" than uplift. Hence what's "familiar" seems trite.

But Sebold isn't trite. We demand logical human behavior, but there's a randomness about everything that lies ahead. Wry observations bring the ordinary to the surface without, in most cases, pretentiousness. Accusations of peddling cheap sentiment ring false because she draws upon her past to conjure up spare, abstract subtext and expressions to carry her tale. She succeeds using observational symbolism without wielding a preachy sledgehammer. Looking for religious dogma in heaven? Forget it. To Susie, "heaven" is just a shorthand for where she "is." It could be anything.

Sebold's idea is that the dead do more than just "think." There are reasons why they suddenly seem near, then disappear. She told ABC News that she doesn't think too much about heaven. But she obviously thinks a lot about the dead, especially victims of violence. Some complain her characters are "caricatures." Composites of traits we've seen in friends and ourselves makes a concept less believable? Susie's "voice," regardless of age, represents her view, however subjectively precocious, illogical or formulaic. Only one chapter goes off the tracks, proffering a scene that comes too close to "Ghost."

Is this a book for the ages? Maybe not. But I'm disturbed that a "commercial" success, even unexpected (as some forget this was), can be disproportionately punished with contempt in forums, unworthy of being labeled a "literary success." If the masses like it, hype is responsible and it must be suspect, despite glowing reviews from respected critics, many with advanced degrees in English and comparative literature.

For me, a non-fiction reader, the restrained poignancy of Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" is a surprise in the aftermath of her uncensored and harrowing memoir, "Lucky." In the hands of any writer bereft of real-life misfortune, concepts about death in a fictional tale, wouldn't have worked. It's impossible for me to ignore the author's history, despite her repeated statements that a huge gulf exists between "Lucky" and "The Lovely Bones."

Yet the success of "The Lovely Bones" proves it doesn't matter. Thirty years from now, people will still be talking about it. I'm convinced no matter how hard Sebold tries -- the legacy created by her non-fiction "Lucky" and her fictional "The Lovely Bones" -- will remain preserved AND inextricably linked. This is why she succeeds in restating, however inadvertent, the universal message that if life is defined by only what we see, our dead remain in the past. But if life is defined by our intermittent recognition of their "presence," they remain eternal.