Review: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (SBRC#3)

I’m writing this review as my entry for the Summer Break Reading Challenge Activity #3.

Published: 2002, Picador (UK)

Summary: Susie Salmon is fourteen. She is also dead.

In this heart-wrenching story, Susie tells the story of her mysterious disappearance back in 1973. She narrates from heaven – a nice place that is surprisingly like her old school playground just with better swings and counsellors to help make sure the new kids settle in okay. Whatever Susie wants appears when she wants it which would be brilliant if it worked for what she wanted most of all – to go home.

But Susie can never go home so instead she watches as her family copes (and doesn’t cope) with her death and then move on as best they can. Her father sets out to find whoever killed her and Susie so desperately wishes she could help point him in the right direction.

The beautiful innocence of the narration and breath-taking storytelling in this novel creates a surprising, touching, suspense-filled tale of family, love, passion, loss and hope.

What I liked: Susie’s no-nonsense, innocent fourteen year old voice tells the story in such an engaging way it’s more like listening than reading. You instantly want to hear what she has to say and her passion for her family is so clear and immediate that you automatically care for them as well.

Passion is a word I could easily over-use when talking about this book because it is brimming with it. Every character is full of passion of some sort, be it the romantic type or passion for justice or other things you will discover for yourself. This could be overwhelming, however, Alice Sebold has balanced everything almost perfectly so that instead it creates an atmosphere of reality because everyone is passionate about something in life and she has captured this in a brilliant manner.

Despite the matter-of-fact personality displayed by Susie in her narrative, the sensitive subjects broached in the story are treated delicately and emotionally, I admit to crying more than once as well as laughing out loud and, sometimes, a painful combination of the two.

What I didn’t like: I wasn’t sure about the very first chapter. It was very sudden and graphic and I wasn’t expecting it. I thought, as I read on, that maybe it could have been rearranged to be part of chapter two or three but now, in hindsight, perhaps the very beginning was the best place for it. It made you sit up and *need* to read on rather than want to. I just wasn’t ready for it when I picked up the book.