The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold: gkr

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

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Finally, a book I really liked for this vacation. (Not completely true though. I also read The Maltese Falcon, but my copy is part of a collection of Dashiell Hammett novels, so it doesn't count until I finish the collection.) Ms. Sebold's The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon's murder, told by Susie Salmon from heaven. That and the aftermath as it affected her family and several friends. Writing a story based on heaven is difficult, and in fact the story drags and gets into flights of theologic fancy in its denouements in heaven. It's somewhat like reading someone else's dream. I'm sure it means something to the author and a few new-agey type people, but for the rest of us one person's view of heaven is abstract art. It's hard to get it. But I liked the bittersweet view of her family. One of the few novels I've read that showed grief realistically. Not everyone grieves the same, and not everyone does positive things as a result of grief. Sometimes they get self-destructive. I also like that none of her family is a Rambo. When they do confront the killer, they don't. They do it passive-aggressively, and they run away. That's realism.

Sebold, Alice.

The lovely bones : a novel / Alice Sebold.

328 p. ; cm.

ISBN 0-316-16881-5
1. Murder victims' families--Fiction. 2. Teenage girls--Crimes against--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.E26 L68 2002
813'.62001-050622

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The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

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