“Tell me you love me”, he said.
Gently I did.
The end came anyway.

This book is a dichotomy to me. I find it utterly beautiful and impactful but equally arduous and unsatisfying; I can completely understand why it is so divisive.

I read it not long after it came out and loved it so much that I read it over and over, as I did with everything I loved as a kid. Therefore, my opinion could be skewed by my nostalgia for my 12/13-year old self. I was reluctant to read it again as, after seeing so many negative reviews, I expected that my vastly altered reading tastes would ruin a book that I had read to shreds and that had such an impact on me growing up.

I was so glad to find that I loved it just as much, albeit in an entirely different way and other than some issues with the writing and THAT chapter, it was perfect. Each day since I finished it I have thought about it more and more, something very few books bring out in me.

The beginning is both disturbing and gripping, so much so, that I remembered it vividly despite it being over 10-years since I had last read it, which was a surprise to me as I can’t usually even remember what day it is. I had read the author’s memoir Lucky and I believe this in part has also contributed to the resonance of the first chapter.

The middle and end, although less striking (it was a hard act to follow), were a mix of sadness and hope; though it seemed to have lost direction and pace in places, I really felt the message in the end and my love for the characters was enough to keep me going.

Now, being an adult, I felt so much more the love and devastation of the adults and saw how the kids are actually far stronger and more resilient. Jack was wonderful, but that wasn’t something we were told, it grew with the story. He is possibly the best, most loving Dad I have ever read about. I was taken aback by some seemingly uneventful moments that now were heartbreaking and it felt as though the author really understood grief in these small details and so much of it really rang true to me.

Despite being about a murder, it is not a thriller or mystery as we know almost immediately what has happened and whodunnit. Instead, it is an exposed and authentic account of grief that, due to the unusual point of view, we get the benefit of understanding from both sides and without pretence as Susie can see them without the masks that they put on for others and each other. In this way, it is a character-driven ‘journey’ story and if you are willing to invest yourself in them and have your heart broken then I would definitely recommend it.

I would never have read this if it weren't for my bookclub. Having avoided it since it came out, I had very low expectations and so was surprised to be engrossed in the story - untill, about half-way through, it seemed to lose the plot and meandered around aimlessly, getting repetitive as it tried to wring emotion out of its characters, and me.

Susie Salmon is dead. She begins her story by describing how she is murdered, and her family's reaction. From her place in heaven, she can watch anyone she wants to, but apart from "touching" Ruth, a fellow 14-year-old student at her school, on her way out, she can't make her presence felt. Ruth becomes a little obsessed with Susie, and starts to see and feel dead people, keeping a record of them in her diary. Susie's mum uses her daughter's death as a trigger to leave her family and try to recapture her youth. She is constantly described as a woman who never wanted to be a mother. Susie's dad takes her death particularly bad, and focuses on his two other children, Lindsey and Buckley.

Susie watches from heaven as her family grows older, watches as Lindsey goes from first kiss to accepting a marriage proposal, watches her murderer, Mr Harvey, a serial killer who is [spoiler alert!:] never caught, and, at the end of the book, possesses Ruth's body so she can lose her viginity to the only boy she ever kissed.

The Lovely Bones is fairly ambitious, and although it manages to keep from slipping into sentimental indulgence, it also lacks drive, and misses many opportunities to really delve into some interesting and important issues. Some devices were a bit cheesy, and seemed like avoidance. I guess I, like most people, would have been more satisfied if Mr Harvey had been caught, but that's not necessarily realistic either. The main reason why I struggled to finish it and why I give it only 2 stars is that the second half has nowhere to go, it loses its immediacy as the years go by and people start moving on, letting go of Susie, whose body was never found either. The characters started to annoy me - I wanted to be sympathetic, even of the mother, who, in a way, has the hardest time of all, but they began to get cliched.

That said, there are some nice descriptions, Susie's voice is apt, there's a great sense of time (she's killed in the 70s) without being too obvious, and even if you only read the first half, it's well written and gripping before it becomes tedious.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is the story of Susie Salmon, a teenage girl who's murdered by her rapist, George Harvey, and how then her family copes up with the trauma while she watches over them from purgatory.
At the start of the story Susie is brutally raped and murdered by her eccentric middle-aged neighbor, George Harvey, who then chops her body and dumps her bones down a sinkhole. It will never be found or so the killer thinks, but for a single bone from her elbow that's picked up by a dog from the neighborhood. The crime scene is zeroed in on a cornfield that's adjoining Susie's High School and while the police suspect and question everyone in the neighborhood, including Ray Singh who has a crush on Susie and has written a love letter to her, they somehow, never suspect George Harvey. Turns out that the latter is a serial killer and after suffering a traumatic childhood, fell into the habit of raping his victims and killing them in the most gruesome of ways.
The trauma of it all takes away simple joys of life from Susie's family. They stop enjoying together as a family. Susie's mother and father grow apart, her kid brother grows mature overnight and her sister, Lindsey wears a thick shield around her at all times so no one can sympathize with her for the loss. Susie's friend, Ruth is the only one who can feel Susie's presence around her. And that's where the story transcends human barriers for Susie would soon get into Ruth's body to fulfill that one wish that she's nursed ever since she died.
So, will George Harvey ever be caught? Will her family ever get over her loss? Will she finally be at peace in her death?
The Lovely Bones is a beautiful story. There could have been much drama, but that's been avoided for the best. The narrative isn't forced. There are no attempts by the author to give a chance to Susie's spirit for retribution, which would be so natural to expect. Overall, it's a very good read and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Re-read for 2020

The first time I ever read this book I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finish it. This time I read it to see how it had aged and if my rating still stacks up. It sure does!

Set in the 1970's, teenage protagonist, Susie Salmon, begins her story with the day of her murder and everything that happens to her family, friends and her murderer. If you like your stories with happy endings where justice prevails and the bad guy ends up behind bars , it's probably safe to say, you'll be very unsatisfied.

Definitely the two characters that I loved the first time around and still love many years later are Susie's father and sister, Lindsay. I know it sounds totally judgmental and cold, but I still think Susie mom is just a really awful character. When her son tells her to !%&* #!!" I felt that was definitely placed in the book for readers like me. I know Susie and Alice Sebold would be disappointed but I just cannot help how I feel. Maybe a third read would bring around the empathetic tone?

Overall, it's still a powerful story for me.

Goodreads review published 23/03/20

This book could have easily fallen into the "same old, same old" category, but it didn't and that's why it's so good. There are certain things that I'm going to pick apart and point out that could be considered spoilers so this is your warning. Don't continue reading if you don't want to be spoiled. If you continue reading, don't bitch at me that I gave something away because I warned you. If you want to know in brief what I thought (because I know you so desperately value my opinion) here it is: beautifully written and unique novel with engaging, fully developed characters. Really, what more could you want in a novel?

Okay, now down to the nitty gritty. At first I thought that this was going to be a sort of mystery novel. We know that Susie is dead, but I bet we're going to have to figure out who killed her and why! Nope. Straight off the bat Susie tells us who, what, when, where, why and how. Then I'm thinking, okay, so what's going to keep this novel going? In any other novel you pick up that has someone murdered you usually keep reading only to find out who, what, when, where, why and how. Now why am I reading this?

Despite being curious about how heaven was going to be portrayed, it was the fact that I held the knowledge of Susie's death that none of the other characters held. It's the feeling of omniscience that kept me reading. So many times, along with Susie, I wanted to scream at characters, tell them to wake up! Tell them that Susie was still there, to not be sad. The novel ends up not being so plot driven as it is character driven. To have book being pushed along by characters is always a risky thing, but Sebold pulls it off beautifully.

It's Susie watching them all that makes it so beautiful. She doesn't age as everyone else does. She watches her sister and can only grow up through her. She can only have experiences such as a serious boyfriend, finishing school, losing her virginity, through her sister. You feel pity for Susie during these moments. You know that she has been robbed, and you feel so angry about that.

The only part that I found strange was when Susie suddenly becomes Ruth and has sex with Ray. It didn't seem to fit with the style of the novel and would have fit better in a fantasy style book or ghost story rather than what Sebold had been giving us the entire time. I wonder if Sebold didn't really know how to end it or she felt bad for Susie and wanted her to have that one moment for herself. As much as you want to give Susie that moment, I think it would have made the novel so much deeper and touching if she never got it. She's dead! She was murdered! Really, she'll never get that moment. How much more would that have meant to the reader? Of course you would be left feeling bad for Susie, but it's reality. The rest of the novel had been steeped in reality, why was this one part written to be not so?

That was the only part that bothered me. Over all though, this novel was touching and an awesome read. I like books with a unique take on old stories... this is one of those. What happens when we know how the murder occured? What happens afterwards? Find out.

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.

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.

2.5

There is too much blood in the earth...

There have been few books I couldn't or wouldn't review and this book is one of them.
I mean what can i say about a book in which the murderer is revealed right at the beginning? Where the most exciting part of of the book is the beginning?

Susie wanted to become a wildlife photographer, but her life was tragically cut short when she was murdered by their neighbour.
And that's it! The rest of the book is one long and boring narrative.

The fictional story of the Lovely Bones was really sad, but intriguing at the same time.The book was about a girl named Susie,she was 14 years old and had a wonderful loving family who cared deeply about each other.She was loved by many.One day as Susie was walking across the field from school she was stopped by a man who would destroy her life and the lives of everyone that loved her.He not only ruined her life forever,but her family and friends will never be the same.What he did was so disgusting and unforgivable.For goodness sakes he murdered a young,innocent girl who had many great things to accomplish in her life ahead.
What this man,Mr.Harvey did,was he built an underground room.He would sit down there in his room and mastermind plans to murder young women.What he did to Suzie was he stopped her in the field and asked her if she wanted to see his room.Of course her being as naïve as she was she accepted his offer and went down there not knowing her own fate.Down in that room he raped her then murdered her,put her in a garbage bag and dragged her to his house.He left her body in the bag for many weeks while her blood seeped through the bag onto his garage floor.He later put the body into a safe and took it to the junk yard.At first nobody knew who murdered this young girl.The only evidence was a hat that she had on,and the only bone of hers forgotten in the field,her elbow.
After Susie’s death her family began to separate from each other.Her parents lost their love for one another.Her younger sister who was 12 at the time began to push away from her family and became very quiet and alone.Her little brother Bucky being 4 years old did not really understand what happened,but as he grew up he began to branch out from his family and be much more to himself.He was not the same little boy he once was.Their mom left her family for the detective.This did not help the family at all.
Throughout the duration of the novel there was a continuous theme.The theme was that you have to be strong and move on.You can never give up,you have to keep pushing on even in the roughest times.Throughout the story there was one profound tone.That tone was very melancholy.The whole story was sad and very hard to imagine things like that really happen in real life.There was a lot of internal conflict within the characters in this book.Susie’s father was very emotionally drained.He had a very strong suspicion that Mr.Harvey was the killer.Even when nobody believed him he never stopped believing that.Susie’s mother was giving up on her family.She was burned out,sad,and lost.Lindsay began to think that she was all alone in this crazy world and nobody loved her.Bucky isn’t the outgoing little boy he once was.He used to be a wild and an exciting boy.After her death he sat in his box in the backyard and talked to himself.In this novel the Lovely Bones there was a lot of foreshadowing.Like in the beginning Alice Sebold mentions how Mr.Harvey is planning on building this underground room.She explains how he is a bit strange and how nobody in the neighborhood really trusts him and they don’t know much about him.This got my mind running,thinking that he may be a sexual predator and preys on children.Also she mentions the eye connection between Susie’s mother and Len,the detective. This made me see that there was an instant relationship building up.As a result their mother left her family for this man. t
The story the Lovely Bones was one that I really liked. I liked how the author gave insights to what Susie was feeling,and witnessing while she watched everyone she left behind on Earth. She gave the perspective from Susie from Heaven. What I really didn’t like about the novel is how she skipped back and forth from different perspectives of the characters so quickly without finishing their thoughts or elaborating on their opinions. I would most definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes mysteries.

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.

When I picked this book up from the library quite many years ago even before it was even made into a movie, I had no clue as to what this book will be about. I thought, it may well be about a story of a girl who is all skin and bones but who is very lovely and thus, the title. But again, as many books do to me, it proved me wrong. This book is certainly not a lovely story for what is lovely about a murder story? What is lovely though is the way the heroine (even if she was no longer alive) solved the mystery of her life and death.

کتاب در مورد دختری ۱۴ ساله به نام سوزی هست که توسط همسایه‌شان مورد تجاوز قرار می‌گیره و به قتل می‌رسه، حالا خود سوزی روایت‌گره همه چیزه، کتاب تم جنایی داره.
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برای من چندان جالب نبود.
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برنده‌ی جایزه‌ی ملی کتاب انگلستان سال ۲۰۰۴
جزء لیست پرفروش‌های نيويورک تایمز
برنده‌ی جایزه‌ی برام استوکر سال ۲۰۰۲
فیلم اقتباسی این کتاب هم در سال ۲۰۰۹ به کارگردانی پیتر جکسون ساخته شده.