The Lovely Bones
By Alice Sebold
400 pages;
Little, Brown and Company
Because Susie made
us trust—and cry for—a ghost
In
the beginning, we know that 14-year-old Susie Salmon is dead—brutally, horrifyingly murdered on
her way home from school. In the end, thanks to the miraculous narrative
talents of Alice Sebold, we know that Susie Salmon is one of the more
captivating creations of recent fiction.
In
Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, she has crafted a gripping tale
of tragedy and grief that play themselves out in a family, in a community, and
in the afterlife of the victim. As Susie looks down on her family, her
monstrous, damaged serial killer, and on her first love from the place she
calls heaven, the intensity of her desire to remain real to them and to know
what it might have been to have lived and grown old gives her the strange power
to touch the lives of those she has left behind. Part detective story, part
family drama, part meditation on what lies beyond, The Lovely Bones is a page-turner in the most
literary sense.
"Inside
the snow globe...the penguin was alone...and I worried for him. When I told my
father this, he said, 'Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in
a perfect world.'" Susie Salmon and her family learn there's no such thing
as a perfect world, only a perfect enough one. That Sebold so brilliantly
maintains all of the narrative strands and hard-to-swallow conceits she has set
in motion is nothing short of a revelation.
— Elaina Richardson
