The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
Fiction- Supernatural or Realistic, I’m not quite sure. It certainly doesn’t fit most genres.
RavenFeatheredQuill
Ages 14 or 15+ (This story is quite gruesome at the beginning, and contains a good bit of mature content)

Summary: The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold: "My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. It was December 6, 1973 when I died."
That’s what the book starts with. That is also what is on back cover. Pretty powerful intro, is it not?
Susie Salmon, fourteen years old, is walking home from school when she is assaulted by a neighbor, Mr. Harvey (sorry about the passive voice). The first few chapters are not for the fainthearted or weak of mind, believe me. The book starts in unimaginable horror, and is completely sad throughout, but is beautiful.
Back to the story. Mr. Harvey is, apparently, a skilled murderer and gets rid of Susie’s body, all the while Susie is watching in her Heaven. Nothing related to Susie is found, save for… Well, I’ll let you find out. Susie watches the police try to find the murderer, starting with her possible boyfriend. Slowly, her father starts to feel that Mr. Harvey knows something, and despite the police thinking he is ridiculous, tries to prove Mr. Harvey’s guilt, an endeavor eventually shared with Susie’s sister as well. Susie just continues watching her family. Her sister grows up, as does her brother. She also watches her friends- her would-be boyfriend, who was the first suspect of the case, and a girl that mistakenly became her friend. For years, over ten years, she watches her family as it struggles and changes, meets and learns more about Mr. Harvey’s other victims.

Critique: Before reading this book, I had become hooked onto from the movie preview, swearing to myself (once I found out it was a book first) I would read it. Yes, well, it took a while. I didn’t see the movie, but now I want to. This book is absolutely amazing, but save a weekend for it so you can cry or yell or make faces at it without being awkwardly in school or public. Some parts are a little horror-filled or TMI, but it sort of all cancels out. This is definitely a crying book- not much can be said for me, I don’t cry at books save for one or two, but come close during some. This is a close one.
The beginning starts in horror; it’s really easy to gasp or react to a book. I may not cry easily at books, but I do make faces at them. This book has all the moments- the “why?” sad, disgusted, and confused moments, the “awww” moments, the “TMI” moments… Everything.

Excerpt: “My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. My murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and coffee grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My father came home smiling, making jokes about how the man’s garden might be beautiful but it would stink to high heaven once a heat wave hit.”

Susie is a young teenager, barely a teenager, and still in middle school, technically. There aren’t many “fun little excerpts” in this book, so I may as well show you how it’s written- anecdotes are thrown in casually, the story told out of order in some places.

I cannot rate books. Truthfully, I cannot rate anything. If you’re reading a review by me, and it’s good, well then count that as a good rating. If I’m making fun of it, it’s a bad rating. Let’s see. I will give this book a 9. A 9.25. A book like this one only gets a 10 if it makes me cry. It's truly a book that will mess with your mind, so it gained points for that. And the beauty of the language and themes and whatever else are great.

Now that The Lovely Bones has been read and thoroughly reviewed, it has been deemed suitable to be inducted into The Best of YA: For Fiction Fanatics.


This has been a summareview by yours truly, RavenFeatheredQuill.  "Oh, come on. You heard them, just behind the veil, didn’t you? They were just lurking out of sight, that’s all. You heard them." (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)