The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
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Book Reviews of The Lovely Bones
Book Review: Analysis of The Lovely Bones
Summary: 4 Stars
Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002. Pp. 328. ISBN: 0-316-66634-3.
The Lovely Bones is a novel set around a fictitious but all too realistic tragedy of a young girl's disappearance and murder. The narrator and main character of the novel, Susie, tells her story from heaven as we the reader follow her family and friends through a very grueling and evolving process of grief and acceptance. The author of this novel is fairly new to the world of literature, though she has formerly written for both the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. Alice Sebold has one other published book under her belt, a memoir entitled Lucky which was published in 1999. With the publication of The Lovely Bones, she is being hailed by many as a promising new voice in literature. This novel explores the range of emotion, memory, and healing that goes along with one of the more terrible tragedies that a family can face. Beginning with the narrator's murder, the book takes the reader to many different levels of human suffering and strength. Rather than being a murder mystery, the plot travels along a much more personal and connected path with a girl trying to come of age in death as she never could in life.
The main character, Susie Salmon, is forced to watch but never participate in the lives of her friends and family after her brutal murder. In her heaven, Susie is surrounded by whatever her heart desires, yet it is the living still on Earth that she finds the hardest to let go of. Her death is faced differently by every member of her family, with her father's eventual decline and breakdown, as well as her mother's futile attempts at escape from her pain and duties of being a mother. Lost in her grief, Susie's mother distances herself from her husband and family through an emotionless affair and even moves across the country for several years, as she tries desperately "to find a doorway out of her ruined heart," (197). Susie's younger sister, Lindsey is forced to mature much quicker than she might have normally, and becomes the stabling force in her family's house, a strength that their father and youngest brother draw from time and time again. It is Lindsey who remains calm and understanding to her father's disprovable theories concerning her sister's death, and it is Lindsey that the younger brother always runs to in need of comfort or explanation during their mother's absence. Susie's friends Ruth and Ray are also objects of her close attention. Living out her junior high romance with Ray vicariously through Ruth, Susie watches happily as the two graduate high school and then college, while always honoring Susie's memory in their hearts.
After her father suffers a heart-attack, Susie's mother is compelled to return home, and for the first time in nearly ten years after their loss, the family finds itself back together once again. For the first time since Susie's death, they are able to accept the fact that they are living and continuing on without feeling that they are betraying Susie's memory. These connections are what Susie observes as "the lovely bones,"(320), the realizations made after she was gone. Around this same time, she witnesses the accidental but just death of her murderer, Mr. Harvey, who although much suspected, was never caught. It is after seeing her reunited family that Susie can finally find and accept comfort in her heaven, and it is on a very inspiring note that she bids the reader farewell.
The target audience of this book is teen to adult, due to the sometimes gripping description of Susie's death and other adult themes. I feel the general population would enjoy this book, though I would imagine some mixed reactions regarding the plausibility of some supernatural elements of the story, especially Susie's description of heaven and her ability to watch over others. Some of these ideas of the afterlife may not agree with everyone else's, or the Bible's, but this is a story worth suspending any reservations about because of its beautiful message.
I personally loved the book and would definitely recommend it to others because it's beautifully written. The characters are so intricately developed and complex that they are impossible not to care about, and the author's use of language keeps the plot flowing effortlessly for the reader. I commend the author for her graceful approach to this otherwise horrible subject, and weaving throughout it the perfect balance of sadness, honesty, and humor.
Book Review: Boring rubbish - and I'll tell you why
Summary: 1 Stars
In my opinion, The Lovely Bones:
is not a good book;
is waste of your time;
has one very disturbing scene; and
you would be much better off reading something else (or spending your money on a nice lunch even).
OK, so why isn't it a very good book?
The premise of the book is nice enough. Susie is a sweet 14 year old girl who is raped and murdered, goes to heaven and watches her family and friends as she longs to return to Earth. There is scope here to explore human themes of grief, love, loneliness etc (add your own possibilities here). There is also scope here for a really positive book about the human condition (or even a negative book about the human condition if you like). Unfortunately the execution of the interesting premise is so poorly done that no themes emerge at all and what we are served up is maudlin, boring rubbish about a 14 year old girl watching a vast array of people go about their (relatively uninteresting) lives. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and it never did.
I just couldn't understand what this book was supposed to be about. There are no revelations about life, death or living. It isn't a book about hope. It isn't a book about grief. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to say about anything. The best possibility (and the part that I enjoyed the most in the book) was exploring the different ways in which Susie's family grieved her death. But even this didn't get very far. I could almost sympathise with the father's grief, but found him ineffectual and weak. (By the way - are we really to believe that he would send his surviving daughter into the house of the man he is convinced killed Susie in order to search for clues?) And the Mother was too self-absorbed and selfish to have any emotional response to her daughter's death or any sort of connection with her family.
I think what the author might have been trying to do was show how the various people that had been a part of Susie's life when she was alive remained connected after her death. But this didn't work either because the connections were tenuous at best and what the book really amounted to was a 14 year old girl watching a bunch of different people go about their lives. Boring.
There were also too many characters that we didn't get to know and too many sub-plots that didn't add anything to the story. What was the point of the people Susie met in heaven? What was the point of Ray's cigarette smoking mother and never there father? What was the point of the Grandmother? Why did we keep getting cut scenes to the killer sleeping rough? All of which created a fairly disjointed feel to the book. I think some further editing and a better focus on what it was supposed to be about would have aided the book greatly.
And then just to really kick you in the guts the ending is unbelievably trite and clichéd. Very disappointing.
Why is this book a waste of your time? - Because life is too short to waste time reading rubbish books. If you want to spend your precious time reading books then go out and find one better than this.
What is the one incredibly disturbing scene? - That would be the scene where 14 year old Susie returns to Earth and has sex with a grown man. What makes this particularly unpleasant is (i) she uses another woman's body to do this; (ii) her only sexual experience when she was alive was to be brutally raped (and murdered); and (iii) the guy knew what was going on (i.e. he was having sex with a 14 year old girl who had taken over the body of another woman) and didn't think anything was unusual. I wonder why Susie chose to get jiggy rather than talk to her grieving family or tell people the identity of her murderer? I found this whole scene quite unpleasant.
Why would you be much better off reading something else? - Because there are much better books out there. I think this is an example of a book that gets tipped by popular reviewers (Richard and Judy here in the UK; Oprah book club in the US - you know the type) and then the masses go out and read it. Next thing you know everybody is talking about it; everybody is telling you how great it is and you feel compelled to go out and read it. So you do. And then you are disappointed. The Di Vinci Code is another recent example of this type of average book that gets hyped up.
You'd think that I would have learned by now.
Book Review: "They Saw the Future and it was Loud..."
Summary: 3 Stars
The basic premise of Alice Sebold's most famous novel is (in my opinion) the reason for its success. A girl is murdered, and watches from heaven as her family and friends continue on with their lives without her. Such a hook is so unique, so fascinating, so painful and poetic that it's no wonder that this book has been a bestseller. Unfortunately several flaws in the storytelling mean that the tale itself doesn't always live up to the golden premise (and often the prose is awful!), but ultimately "The Lovely Bones" is a poignant and unforgettable read.
Susie Salmon tells the story in first-person narrative after her death. At fourteen years old she was lured into an underground cavern, raped and killed by her neighbour Mr Harvey - now she watches her family cope with her disappearance, her presumed death and the years that follow her passing; all the time desperately longing to be amongst them once more.
She watches all her family from above (her parents and her siblings), as well as other friends, acquaintances, pets and various objects that go astray; the boy she first kissed, the friend who felt her passing, the detective investigating her case, her missing charm bracelet, her dog and - most importantly - the man who took her life. As she watches time passes; her mother handles her grief by having an affair, her sister Lindsay falls in love, her grandmother returns to take control of the family, and her little brother - too young to understand or even remember Susie's death - grows up in a world without her.
Sebold nails the family dynamics; the fear, anxiety, horror, guilt and grief that comes with the death of a family member, as well as the denial, pain and surrealism that follows as they gradually adjust to her absence and the anniversary of Susie's death approaches. Susie's father's guilt, her mother's detachment, her sister's anger - all are captured to perfection. Nothing will ever go back to normal for the Salmon family, and things are churned up further when Mr Salmon begins to suspect Mr Harvey was involved in his youngest daughter's death. The haunted memories of the family are wonderfully balanced with moments of transcendence and beauty found in life; giving the sense that both life and death are not that far away from each other.
Sebold's treatment of heaven was (in my opinion) unsatisfactory, with her only original idea being the thought that each person gets their own personalised heaven - Susie's is a high school and playground. But beyond this, her images of heaven seemed quite flat; there is no mention what it actually feels like to be in heaven, what revelations and inner knowledge one might gain and (strangest of all) no mention of God at all. Susie is focused entirely on earth-bound matters. This of course was Sebold's decision, as an author she perhaps simply wasn't interested in exploring the heaven-side of her story, but I felt that it was oddly lopsided to focus so much on the life of Susie's family rather than what heaven is like.
With the exception of Susie herself, the most vivid character is Lindsay (though perhaps this is because I'm also an older sister) who goes through the coming-of-age that Susie missed out on. It is Lindsay who Susie is most interested in watching from heaven, riveted by her changing form, her growing love for her boyfriend and her deep-seated sadness at the death of her sister. Out of all the characters and storylines portray, it is Lindsay and her quiet struggle that was most memorable to me. Creeping through Mr Harvey's house, running through the rain with her finance, visiting the scene of her sister's death - Sebold is at her best when dealing with Lindsay.
However, the second half of the book is severely weakened as Sebold changes in tone too drastically so that she can fit in a rather strange episode concerning Susie and her first crush. Sebold tries to compensate for Susie's missed maturity, but in a way that feels as though it belongs in a different book, which also takes much of the bittersweetness out of Susie's heavenly existence. It wouldn't be fair to give it away to those that haven't read it; but those that have finished the book will know what I'm talking about and scanning over some other reviews I can see there was similar disappointment at the conclusion. (However, the last paragraph is so poignantly beautiful I almost forgive her for the previous misstep).
Book Review: Wonder and Insight Disfigured by a Tragically Wrong Conclusion
Summary: 2 Stars
This book was recommended to me in the wake of a tragic loss. It would console me, I was told, and for most of the way it did; console, encourage, and enlighten. But then I came to the end and felt cheated and angered by what I found to be a phony and damaging conclusion, and so I chose to write this review to let other people know what they may be in for if they read it. I say "may be" because some will react far more positively to the hopefulness of its ending than I did. For me it was as if the closing scenes of "Citizen Kane" had been scripted by someone at Disney.
Susie Salmon, murdered 14-year-old girl, is recounting her life from heaven and the lives of those she left behind, on Earth, as she both observes and interacts with them. There was a lot about this book I genuinely enjoyed, starting with the quality of the writing. Alice Sebold has a marvelous facility for turning a phrase in just such a way as to make it especially memorable; a sharp poignancy when you wouldn't expect it or a surprising and profound insight. And she never lets up, with the result that the book has a wonderful feel of wholeness for much of its length. Her ear for dialogue is excellent, too. A little less successful was her characterization, especially of the female protagonists. While Jack, Susie's seemingly inconsolable father, is sharply drawn, as is her brother Buckley and her friend Ray, Susie's mother Abigail somehow never gels as a person, making her dramatic turns (first running after the officer who's investigating her daughter's case and then leaving her husband) hard to understand. At the time she absconded I hadn't even realized there had been any difficulties between them. And that points to another weakness: a lack of dramatic weight. Somehow a grieving family should just plain grieve more than the well-scrubbed and polished people here did. Grandma Lynn much too often crosses the line into parody, though better that than the blandness with which Susie's sister Lindsey is drawn, and George Harvey seems too easily the stereotypical mama's boy gone wrong.
But for me the real problem with the book was its ending: happy, sappy, totally out of keeping with what came before it, and ultimately wrong-headed. In one of the best scenes in the novel, possibly one of the best and most provocative scenes I've read anywhere, Susie's brother Buckley, eight years after Susie's death, finds some old clothes of hers and uses them to cover some vegetables he's planted in his garden. His father, seeing this from the house, runs out to ask him what he's doing, and while Buckley explains that it's been years since his sister died their father sees the act of putting her clothes out to help his son's gardening as akin to sacrilege. Suddenly he hears a voice saying "Let go, let go, let go," and I assumed (as I suppose most people would) that it was that inner voice telling him that it's time to put the past behind him and move on. But it's not! He's having a heart attack and the voice is his daughter's calling him from heaven to let go of his earthly life. She's lonely for him and wants him back with her. And then she asks if there's anything wrong with that. If the book had ended there, or shortly afterward, it might have been a miraculous accomplishment. But it didn't.
In the end, the family, minus Susie, comes together to reaffirm their faith in one another and move on to live happily ever after, leaving the memory of their daughter, and their need of that memory, comfortably behind them. Too comfortably. I have known and continue to know many people who have lost children and not one has ever been able to forget it or move on the way these characters did. And while many readers will take comfort from the belief that such damage can be put behind them, just as many (I imagine) will feel terrible that they are incapable of finding equal solace. To those readers, and to the people like me who believe that memories are among the most companionable assets in one's life, the conclusion of this book will seem bitterly disappointing.
Book Review: Bleak, unrealistic and dare I say it?--Unlovely.
Summary: 2 Stars
Like most other negative reviewers here, the main thing that drew me to The Lovely Bones was the hype. When one sees book-reviewing heavyweights like the New York Times giving a work of fiction unequivocal raves, you expect it to be good. Really, really good. Perhaps it was my elevated expectations of the novel that made it such a huge disappointment for me. Or the natural resentment any human would bear a book after hearing it called "a painfully fine literary accomplishment" 180 times. In any case, I found myself extremely bored, annoyed and frustrated after about the first 100 pages or so, having not formed any emotional investment in any of the characters whatsoever.
The Lovely Bones deals with a very gruesome and horrifying subject matter--(and I might add exploits this horrible subject matter shamelessly for pulling cheap emotional strings--but that's beside the point) the brutal rape and murder of a sweet fourteen-year old girl--which is enumerated in extremely graphic and sometimes nauseating detail in the first few pages (talk about a rude introduction). The premise is a rather interesting one--Susie, the murdered girl watches her family and friends deal with her death helplessly, and occasionally when she wants to enough is able to influence their actions. This could make for a wonderful novel--simple, compelling, sweet, hopeful. Sebold, however turns the story into something that is drab, depressing and absolutely unreadable after the first few chapters. Now, I understand that a novel which features a young girl being raped and cut into little pieces in the first chapter is not going to be all sunshine and kitties. But there is still just so much gloominess and depression one can take from one book. The outlook of The Lovely Bones from page 1 is not one of hope and tenderness, as the reviews promise but of death, depression and the sytematic and painful unravelling of a family. The last page leaves you just as gloomy and hopeless as you felt during the rape scene.
The bleak outlook aside, the other thing that made The Lovely Bones so unbearable were the characters. Susie, the narrator was likable enough and Mr. Salmon was heartbreaking and realistic as the desperate father, unwilling to let go but there were some serious kinks in all the other characterizations. Particularly Mrs. Salmon--her lack of response to the news of her daughter's death was suspicious but her affair with the detective investigating it was disgusting and gratuitous and her leaving her shattered family and her two young children behind was not only repulsive and unlikely but....weird... What mother alive would do something like that--leave her children (including a toddler son) and her husband, still reeling from the loss of his daughter to work in a winery in California? Buckley's response to her when she came back was utterly appropriate (Buckley at many points in the novel seemed like the only sane character). And finally, the oft-mentioned Ruth/Ray/Susie sex scene. All I could say after that scene was: Whaaat?!?! A murdered girl who mentally and emotionally is still fourteen years old is given the chance to return to Earth and instead of comforting her broken family or telling the police the identity of her murderer chooses to have sex with a junior high crush she barely knew--and while using another girl's body? What makes this even more bizarre is the fact that Susie's only sexual experience was an unthinkably brutal rape. Would she have recovered so fully that she could have rewarding, normal adult sex with a man? Also, the prevalence of relationships formed in early adolescence that last forever--what is up with that? How likely is it for a girl to marry and have the children of a boy she dated when she was 13? There are just too many parts of The Lovely Bones that don't add up or make any sense at all.
Polar Bear