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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780316666343
ISBN number: 0316666343
Label: Little, Brown and Company
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 328
Printing Date: 2002-06
Publishing house: Little, Brown and Company
Sale Popularity Level: 40505
Studio: Little, Brown and Company
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Product Description:
On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ('like the fish') is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where 'life is a perpetual yesterday' and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her 'simplest dreams,' where 'there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue.' The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years like an episode of My So-Called Afterlife.Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family, and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on Earth as 'like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow.' Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish, and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Amazon.com:
On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ('like the fish') is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey.
Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where 'life is a perpetual yesterday' and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her 'simplest dreams,' where 'there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue.'
The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years like an episode of My So-Called Afterlife. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family, and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on Earth as 'like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow.' Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish, and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons
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Rated by buyers 
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With over 2500 reviews already, it is hard to add something meaningful to the evaluation of this book but hopefully some people will find the following useful.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is a difficult book to read with any enjoyment. The thing that mars the book for me is the way in which the young girl who narrates the story from heaven, Susie Salmon, is killed. She is brutally raped and murdered and then her body is dismembered by a sadistic neighbor who is not immediately apprehended and who consequently haunts the book with his presence. In my view it was not necessary to the basic theme of the book--dealing with loss--for Susie to die in this fashion. A more ordinary death--accident, illness--would have served the author's purpose just as well. Thus it seems an unnecssary bit of sick sensatonalism to have her die in such a gruesome manner.
As I started to read the various responses of the family to Susie's death I was reminded of the opening lines of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Clearly the Salmon family has a right to be unhappy., but one wonders about the impact the death has on them, particularly, Jack the father. The death of one's child is perhaps the greatest sorrow one has to face in life, yet Jack Salmon had two other children and should have remained strong for their sake. In a family that is fundamentally happy and strong, such would have been the case. Thus the way the family comes apart is indicative of a fundamental flaw in its makeup. The one member who comes across as the strongest is a bit of an outsider--Grandma Lynn.
The strength of the book is in the matter-of-fact teen age tone that Sebold is able to give to Susie. She is able to comment on the events that occur on earth with that still-innocent manner of a young girl who despite experiencing the ultimate tragedy and despite being unable to impact what happens to the living remains optimistic. It is the response of Susie's friends and peers that comes across as most appropriate and realistic, while that of the family seems more stereotypical.
The comments on the back cover (from Time magazine's review of the book) may best describe the book: It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled." If you can see the book from this perspective it can have meaning for you.
Rated by buyers 
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This story was all over the place. It started out with a bang and it was all down hill from there. It was not a mystery. It was not a love story. It had NO POINT! I am sorry I purchased the book and I would not recomend it to anyone!!!
Rated by buyers -
This book was interesting to me in some ways, and confusing to me in others. Watching the people below, growing and changing was neat, nut I didn't understand the concept of the 'individual' heavens and things like that. Also, towards the end, my mind was beginning to wonder; like it was starting to draw on...but besides that, it was a great book!
Rated by buyers 
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I stole this book from the stairs of a friend, and had it read curled on my side, hair greasy and unwashed, waiting for Susie to let herself die. I was crying by the very first chapter.
I thought it a stroke of brilliance that Sebold used an idea of C.S. Lewis's 'Great Divorce' hell as her heaven (I had always thought I'd prefer his hell to his heaven, I'd like something solitary, a cabin in the clouds where I can't see anyone, but those I choose as my own family).
Susie's narrative voice was in many ways unbelievably clear, she saw things outside of herself and I would have liked to see more of the loss in death and emotion. But this is Sebold's story, and she wrote primarily about the gain in death, what happened on earth after, and dwelt less on what happened in heaven. For me, I saw the loss of Susie through her desires fulfilled in heaven, not through her voice, which came across as independent of someone with vested interest in what happened on earth.
I loved this book, from beginning to end, the ending is as peaceful as the beginning is terrible. Read it. I recommend it.
Rated by buyers -
I just finished The Lovely Bones, and then I cried for an hour. Now my face is poofy.
The book is, of course, sad. However, it also has a beautiful image of heaven and a wonderful story of a family that ends up healed and whole after the death of their daughter. I was comforted by the way Susie could look down on her family and be near them, even make herself known to them a time or two. In the beginning, Susie spends time thinking of all the things she will never get to do, which of course was terribly hard for me to read, but the worst of it? The absolute worst part was reading about her individual family members as they broke up under the pressure of their own grief. That was what had me crying on the bus. Honestly though, the book was wonderful. It's just something that some of us will have to read alone, in the dark, with wine.
Verdict: A
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