The Lovely Bones

Susie Salmon was raped and murdered in 1973, and, from her perch in heaven, she tells the story of what happened to her, watches her family back on earth as they go about their grief-stricken lives, and describes what it's like to be a kid in heaven. Alice Sebold's novel, which draws on some of her own experiences, became a runaway best-seller as soon as it was published. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

"An extraordinary, almost-successful debut that treats sensational material with literary grace....[M]ostly mesmerizing and deserving of the attention it's sure to receive." - (Kirkus, 5/1/02)

"I asked myself, as I read THE LOVELY BONES, what could be the point of having the dead girl narrate the aftermath of her death--what, in other words, this voice could achieve that a standard omniscient narrator couldn't--and it occurred to me that the answer is that Susie is there to provide comfort: not to those who survive her, to whom she can't really make herself known or felt, but to the audience. The real point of Sebold's novel isn't to make you confront dreadful things, but, if anything, to assure you that they have no really permanent consequences....In its proleptic yearning for rel - Malcolm Thurlby (New York Review of Books, 1/16/02)

"The book's conceit, that Susie lives watchfully on, is also the book's deceit. THE LOVELY BONES aims to be, in the end, a feel-good book about rape, torture and murder, and while such an unlikely achievement is remarkable, it is also unsettling in ways that Sebold does not begin to address....The idea of an epidemic of children being snatched by their neighbors amounts to a fantasy...: it's chilling, thrilling and completely unbuttressed by fact. THE LOVELY BONES endows that fantasy with a happy ending. Cuteness, it turns out, is immortal. This is not only untrue; it's distasteful. For all Se - Chang-mei Lu (London Review of Books, 10/3/02)

"What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy...about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed...through love and acceptance....[Some] lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's achievements: the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; he - John R. Oneal (New York Times, 6/18/02)

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