I have an awkward relationship with this book to say the least.

I don't read a lot of murder mystery contemporaries (is that what it is?) so I couldn't really be the judge of how well that concept was portrayed, but I do know that I still couldn't wedge it deep enough into my interest level.
That's not to say that this book wasn't interesting. There were a few things that were slightly intriguing, but they just couldn't hold me for long.

The Lovely Bones is about a girl, Susie Salmon, who was raped and killed and now watches the aftermath of her death from heaven. The plot does not go in any one continuous direction, but rather bounces around from time periods throughout Susie's life to recap memories. The idea the author had in mind was unique, but I did not like it. The atmosphere of the story is ominously twisted.

Now, now, whoever may be reading this, I know murder mysteries are supposed to be that way. But the thing is, Susie as well as the reader know fully well who the killer is- we even get to see inside his mind at points. Because of that there was less mystery and more frustration. Most of my frustration was towards the side characters in general. Though this may be a work of fiction, nothing in this book felt natural.

I can sort of see where it's going, and I don't want to put in the effort to finish. I DNFed at page 145 or so. I've got better things to read.

EDIT:

So. I looked at the reviews. I saw the ending.

And boy, oh, boy am I glad that I didn't finish! What the helheim kind of ending is that???

I don't know about you, but this goes against all my beliefs about heaven. And I don't know what kind of messed up character development Sebold thought she was doing, but basically turning Susie into her rapist and killer, George Harvey, is super messed up.

Family broken apart comes back together? Cliché and obvious.

But that other ending? *shudders* I'll give her one thing, I didn't see that coming. But SOOOO messed up.

Save yourselves. Please don't read this.

اول کتاب شروع قوی داشت و کل داستان منتظر بودم که جریان شروع شده رو ادامه بده ولی انتظارم نا امید کننده بود.
بنظرم این خیلی تصور کریپییه که یکی در هر حال و کل زندگی آدمو بتونه نگاه کنه و حتی خصوصی ترین قسمتای زندگیت رو ناظر باشه. درکل قسمتای حرص درار زیاد داشت.
بدون علت طولانی شده بود و جزییات بدون نیاز زیادی داده بود در انتها جمع بندی سرسری و بیخودی داشت.
ولی نکته جالبی که داشت و کتاب رو متمایز کرده بود این بود که چطور زندگی ادامه داره و با وجود اینکه یکیو از دست میدی همچنان باید زندگی کنی، باید ادامه بدی.

I've seen the movie countless times and after each time I say I'm going to read the book. WELL I FINALLY DID IT GUYS! I loved the movie so much so there's no surprise that I would love the book as well.

The Lovely Bones is so creepy, but like a good and super addictive kind of creepy read. I loved Susie's character and the story that unfolded. I couldn't but this book down! Even though I've see the movie numerous times, I still wanted to read about what happened to this poor girl. It was amazing, disturbing, and pretty much pure perfection. I saw no flaws with the characters or the writing.

I can totally see myself rereading The Lovely Bones over and over again. I mean, I've seen the movie so many times I might as well catch up.

Observation
The Lovely Bones was a book that was different from my norm, but interestingly so. The story relates to the child murder of Susie Salmon, and how from beyond the grave she watches how her family and friends come to terms with her death, and also how the murderer still lives amongst them.

n   “My name was Salmon, like the fish: first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
…
I was killed by Mr. Botte, by the way.”n

While we are dealing with a child murder, the fact that Susie narrates throughout the story means that it has a supernatural flavour. After the initial horrific coverage of Susie’s rape and murder, the pace changes and with Susie narrating the full force of her death subsides. The loss is not so tangible as she continues to engage with us.

Susie watches, frustrated and saddened that she can’t call out to her family or direct them or warn them as they continue to encounter the murderer, and how he/she continues to stalk menacingly within the neighbourhood. Susie watches as her family pull themselves apart particularly her mother and father as they each deal with the loss totally differently. The mix of emotions is cleverly portrayed from loss to guilt, from sadness to anger, and always with the torment of Susie’s death being unresolved and her body undiscovered. The characters are well developed and continue to evolve along with their various relationships. The relationship between Susie’s school crush, Ray, and a girl Ruth, who seems to have a sense of the supernatural is wonderfully developed. Ray unfortunately due to his closeness with Susie had to endure the initial suspicion and a cloud that he probably finds difficult to shift.

This was Alice Sebold’s debut novel and I feel it still remains her best.

I was really disappointed with this book. The first half was easy enough to read and then unfortunately I started getting bored particularly when Sebold started rehashing the same old lines which was just frustrating after a while. However, if that was the only problem I had I wouldn't be complaining.

There were a bunch of unfeasible "random" coincidences such as Samuel and Lindsey pulling off the road in the rain, running to the abandoned shack then running all the way home only to ... find out at the conclusion that Ruth's dad owns the house. What about Hal, what was the point of Hal's character? To be Grandma's sidekick? I felt like there was no point to these side-line stories and superfluous characters.

I also would've liked to have seen some insight into the mother leaving and completely abandoning her family. So okay, I'm not the author and the author chose to not take that route but I think if you're going to include something as dramatic as that in the novel perhaps touch on it a little more. For me, it would've made it a juicier read. I didn't want know that she was working in a wine factory, I wanted to know what was going on in her head! I mean, she wandered back into the final pages, had a cup of tea with another random character, her son runs past because he has new drumset ... yikes.

I'm not a believer in heaven but am interested in other's perceptions of it. I found Sebold's ideas disappointing. School buildings? A few people dressed up as snowflakes at Christmas time? A very random connection with her Grandfather? To me, this novel felt like a good first draft and just really felt like it needed a good edit, or a heavy rewrite.

The ending was particularly irritating; falling to earth into a body to have sex with some guy who we didn't really care about ... for no reason? I was pretty confused because she'd watched her murderer stalk her sister hours (minutes?) beforehand and didn't use the opportunity on earth to confront her murderer, which is something I, and I presume many people, would've done. But okay, let's just accept that she's not that kind of person, the ending bothered me because the first half really did have promise but then Sebold threw me into an unexpected (and unwelcome) supernatural spin.

Great idea. Poor execution. Maybe that's what everyone got so carried away with. The idea was grand - so grand that they were blinded by the weakness of the actual plot. Further, I guess people find comfort in the idea of heaven. The fact that we mean so much to people that we'll continue having such a huge impact on them once we're gone, that we get to watch them from above after we're dead (voyeuristic much?).

All in all, if people love this book and it affects them, changes their life, their outlook, makes them feel warm and fuzzy, makes them tearful or full of rapture - that's a good thing. I'm just disappointed that such a top seller couldn't do that for me.

the first chapter is pretty impressive: a perfectly captured voice, a suspenseful and disturbing narrative, a jarring end. overall that first part was a moving and challenging experience. the rest of the novel is less impressive, but there is an originality to it that was appealing. the First Person Omniscient perspective has been remarked upon in many reviews - and it does make this book a rather unusual experience. that personalized omniscience creates an at-times annoying quirkiness, but also some pretty wonderful moments, particularly in the noting of various small details - the kind of details that tell you all about a person, the emotions they are wrestling with, what their life story is all about.

but what i found most interesting about Lovely Bones was perhaps not as intentional - namely, the very distancing blandness of our sorta-heroine's voice. if this child had lived, she may have grown up to be ann beattie or margaret diehl or joan didion. her emotional range is not one of many peaks and valleys, it is rather a pleasant flatline. that detachment, that even-handedness, that smoothness... it is a bit strange, a bit creepy. what in the world are they taking up there in heaven, some kind of mega-strength prozac or valium? the afterlife sounds like my exact cup of tea: a place to idly contemplate the lives of those we lived with - but no anxious worrying, no getting unduly agitated or emotional. how relaxing!

there was one key part that i did not care for at all, perhaps enough to dock a star off of this one: the unappealing possession-cum-fantasy sex scene at the end. ugh. it is hard to complain about such a scene not being "realistic", but it just did not feel real to me - well at least the feelings of the two living people involved did not make emotional sense. also, sad to say, it reminded me of the demi moore-makes out with-whoopi goldberg-who is possessed by-patrick swayze scene from Ghost... and that is never a good thing.

Out of my entire reading list for 2022, more people commented about The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold than all of the other books combined!

The Lovely Bones begins with the tragic death of a fourteen-year-old girl, Susie Salmon (like the fish). From there, we follow Susie’s family and friends as well as Susie’s murderer.

The Lovely Bones starts off very strong, and the impulse to read more is almost overwhelming. However, the book is downhill from there.

Writing a book that begins with a death is very unusual. Most authors usually begin in the middle. Unfortunately, the death is the most interesting part of the book, so the rest of the book simply dragged. In my opinion, the plot was interesting, but the execution lacked.

First, The Lovely Bones would have been more compelling as a short story. Another book that begins with a death is The Death of Ivan Ilych, and it is 86 pages. The Lovely Bones is 328 pages (in my copy). The author glosses over a number of years in a single chapter, highlighting a few key events. However, I didn’t feel invested with this vague style of writing (telling rather than showing).

Second, if I was the editor of this book, I would have given each character their own chapter. There were a great number of characters in this book, and the author should have gone deep instead of wide. I’m still not even sure who Hal is. And I was confused whose boyfriend was Lindsey’s and whose was Susie’s. Also, whatever happened to Len?

Third, the ending is horrible, entirely forgettable, and almost laughable.

Overall, The Lovely Bones had a strong beginning, but the storytelling should have been much stronger.

A big thank you to everyone who participated in The Lovely Bones Readalong!

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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When I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, I remember thinking, geez, this is really an okay book. The writing is good. The story is fine. There is a certain genius in the effect, how the main character's descent into madness slowly evolves with the introduction of tiny details. But the reason it gripped me - the reason it probably gripped you - is because the author's ghost haunts every page. At the end of The Bell Jar, the heroine is hopeful, and has put her dark days in the past. Yet we the reader knows full well that Plath was never able to do the same. For Plath, the dark days - the oven - were still ahead. It gives the autobiographical novel profundity and resonance beyond the words between its covers.

I got the same sensation reading The Lovely Bones. Alice Sebold is not dead, but her story of a murdered girl's family is clearly a powerful meditation on her own experience, and of the life she might never have lived.

In her memoir, Lucky, Sebold begins by writing: "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered." She goes on to describe how, as her rapist was on top of her, she saw a pink hair tie on the tunnel floor. She wondered if the hair tie belonged to the dead girl: "I will never know whether the hair tie was hers or whether it, like the leaves, made its way there naturally. I will always think of her when I think of the pink hair tie. I will think of a girl in the last moments of her life."

This novel, in a way, is the story of the girl with the pink hair tie.

It begins, famously, with a disarmingly candid statement from the narrator: "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." That is, pardon the pun, quite a hook. And if it won't resonate down the ages like "Call me Ishmael," it certainly demands the reader keep reading.

Susie was lured into an underground shelter in a cornfield by her creepy neighbor, George Harvey. The novel begins with Susie explaining, in flashback, what happened to her. At times, her tone is a little off-putting, a little too matter of fact, with a calmness that belies every fourteen year-old girl I ever knew. For instance, she remarks, offhand, that a neighbor's dog had found her elbow three days after she disappeared. But maybe that's just the perspective of heaven.

The description of the rape is discrete, yet horrible, with just enough telling, personal details to let your own awful imagination turn loose.

"Don't, Mr. Harvey," I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don't. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged "please" before dying...But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells...I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in a cat's cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.

Following this flashback sequence, we are introduced to Susie's heaven. The sequences set here are the weakest in the novel. It is cliched, simplistic, the place dreams come true. Every time the book returns here, it serves only to soften the impact of the real drama going on down on earth.

If nothing else, Susie's heaven gives her a vantage point from which she can witness her family's disintegration, and later, its rebirth. Her father becomes obsessed with finding her killer, and zeroes in on Mr. Harvey. Her mother struggles to deal with losing her daughter and her now-myopic husband. Eventually, after dabbling in adultery, she bolts and tries to create a new life for herself. Her sister, Lindsey, tries to help her dad, while simultaneously lurching forward on her own path to adulthood. Her little brother Buckley, in another minor cliche, is the youngster attuned to spirits, and can sense Susie's presence. There is also the "little detective," Len Fenerman:

Len Fenerman had been the one that first asked my mother for my school picture when the police thought I might be found alive. In his wallet, my photo sat in a stack. Among these dead children and strangers was a picture of his wife. If a case had been solved he had written the date of its resolution on the back of the photo. If the case was still open - in his mind if not in the official files of the police - it was blank. There was nothing on the back of mine. There was nothing on his wife's.

This book reminded me a lot of Songs for the Missing by Stewart O'Nan. The plot lines are almost identical (The Lovely Bones came first) and center on the families of missing girls. I found O'Nan's work to be superior, mostly because it never lets you off the hook.

By using the conceit of the dead-girl-in-heaven narrator, the reader is spared true sorrow. Yes, the girl is dead, but she's not really, you see? She has an afterlife, and it's pretty cool, apparently, because they have Vogue and Glamour magazines. O'Nan dealt with grief directly; by having us witness events through the prism of Susie's heaven, Sebold only confronts grief obliquely.

It's clear that Sebold has a great deal of empathy for what Susie endured. Perhaps this is why she created the concept of Susie's heaven (that and the fact it was bound to get her to the bestseller list). However, this deep emotional current between author and character is to the ultimate detriment of the novel. It leads to the book's most unfortunate scene, a bit of lost youth wish fulfillment in which Susie inhabits the body of a spiritual girl named Ruth in order to have sex with a boy she once liked. It's not that Sebold does a poor job writing this scene, it's that a scene like this can't be written without being creepy. I get that it's supposed to be powerful - since Susie has been denied everything, even her first kiss - but eww.

This event takes place near the end of the book. It's part of a draggy third act that also finds Susie discovering herself in a continuum of dead women and girls, which leads to some unnecessary contemplation of the universality of Susie's story. The power of this book is in its intensely focused portraits of the members of Susie's family, Susie's killer, and the dogged detective Len Fenerman. It stumbles when it attempts to be something broader. Susie's Richard Matheson-like, non-secular heaven is undercooked when compared to the sharp observations of the people down on Earth.

Nearing the end, I began to despair that such a promising novel was coming to such an unsatisfying conclusion. The last chapter, an epilogue of sorts, comes to the rescue. In just a few pages, a few short paragraphs, she ties up all the story threads, and memorably ends with a man finding Susie's charm bracelet near an old sinkhole. The conclusion is over the top; its saccharine and corny; and when I finished I think I had some dust in my eye. In these passages, Sebold plays to her strengths, with lyrical, cadenced sentences and imparted lessons that might have come across like a Hallmark card had they been delivered by someone who hadn't been in the same dank tunnel Alice Sebold had been.

1.5

The Lovely Bones is the perfect example of a brilliant start gone unbelievably wrong.

Pages 1-35 was the only portion of this book that felt genuine to me. The rest of it went from being okay to bad to just plain ridiculous. Chapter 22 was especially painful - and I don't mean that in an emotional context. It was one of those WTF moments that I'm glad was cut from the movie.

Here's something I don't understand - how can Susie read minds?? This is probably a trivial thing but it's been bugging me non-stop. We are not even told when exactly Susie learns about this ability. It's like one day, she just knows what people are thinking - no explanations how or why. I feel this ruined the narration. There were times when it felt like the usual third person narration and not necessarily like a dead girl's view on things (which is what it's supposed to be).

Linsdey was one of the better sketched characters. Her reaction to Susie's death was one of the few things I didn't have trouble believing. Ruth's obsession, on the other hand, was exaggerated and creepy.

I wish Sebold had focused more on Susie's heaven - I quite like the idea of it. But sadly, it's left unexplored, like many other potentially interesting things in the book.

I prefer the movie. It does a better job at keeping you emotionally invested and is easier to endure than 300 pages of nothing happening.

The ending's still lame though.

So she was raped then murdered. She's in heaven. She borrows someone's body to have sex with a guy she has a crush on? For real? Isn't that also rape? Plus, no plot.. so boring.

I saw the movie years ago and remember it differently than the book. So some of the content was surprising to me. I’m undecided on how I feel about these differences. I think I liked the movie better than the book because the movie was more dramatic and had actual resolution. The book is satisfying in a different way, and in some ways, more realistic in that when people die, the rest of us still need to find a way to keep living.

I thought the writing was strong, but I’m conflicted on the story.

I read and facilitated this discussion in our library book discussion group years ago.

To be honest, it was not an easy discussion, and to even discuss it in this review, I am reminded of the various people sitting around the table feeling somewhat sullen, upset, outraged at times, frustrated, and mixed about this disturbing story.

The book's narrator is 14-year-old murder victim Susie. Raped and killed by her neighbor, Susie ascends to heaven, where she observes how her death has affected those around her.

Her father who suspects the killer's identity, is grief-ridden.

Her mother, who never really wanted children, withdraws and acts out.

Susie's sister, fears the kids will see her only as the kid with the dead sister.

Her little brother struggles with death.

The second half is a ghost story.

Susie sees her family aging, their lives playing out.

I guess as readers we are somewhat like Susie. We are watching her family heal. Or hoping that is what they are doing.

But, at the same time, we are also wanting justice. Like her father is trying to achieve for his daughter.

But, as things went on, it got more frustrating, because when justice wasn't coming, I got more frustrated. Because that is what happens to me.

I don't know about you - but, I just don't like seeing someone get away with something.

It's like watching a real life cold case, and knowing who the murderer is, and knowing he is getting away with it. Here we are...again.

There isn't a happy ending. Am I okay with it? No.

Does that mean I am going to take a star away from this book? Yes. Is that fair? Probably not. But, I'm the reviewer. 3.5 stars