The Lovely Bones

THE LOVELY BONES
by Alice Sebold

 

Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2004, Women's Prize Longlist 2003

 

Date Read: June 11, 2005

 

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."

 

So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her -- her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy.

 

I find it shocking how many people did not appreciate this book but found it poorly written and the subject matter dark. I am sure writing this book was cathartic in a way as Sebold was raped by a stranger in a park while she was in college. I cannot imagine the healing required to continue on with life. For those critics who hated this novel, I offer the final paragraph for consideration:

 

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

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