The Lovely Bones: Deluxe Edition
by Alice Sebold
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alice SeboldEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-17
ISBN: 0316001821
Number of pages: 328
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780316001823
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Lovely Bones: Deluxe Edition
Book Review: A Story For The Soul
Summary: 5 Stars
Some books are worth reading multiple times and "The Lovely Bones" is a perfect example. I've just finished my second reading, my first having transpired almost seven years ago. Due to the vast period of time between those two readings, it was like reading it for the first time and I dare say that the second go-round was more stirring than the first.
The story is told from the perspective of 14-year old Susie Salmon. It begins on the day of her rape and murder by her reclusive neighbor George Harvey and continues in the aftermath of her death as her family grieves, Harvey hides and local police unsuccessfully attempt to locate her remains and convict her killer. The novel spans eight years (beginning in 1973), Susie watching from her own personal version of heaven (hers always smells lightly of skunk, a neighboring soul's version like kumquats) as her mother and father grow apart, her sister Lindsey withdraws and her brother Buckley continues to feel her absence as he makes the transition from boy to young man. In addition to her family, Susie follows the happenings of her crush Ray Singh and a poet and artist named Ruth Connors who has an inexplicable connection to her. While pining for another coveted kiss with Ray and longing for her time back on Earth, Susie makes heartbreaking observations on how her death encourages the tightening of bonds between certain members of her family and community while tearing others apart.
Each character is fully fleshed out. Whereas most novels tend to concentrate on only a select few characters, author Alice Sebold invests a generous amount of personification in almost all of them. Susie's mentality goes from girl to woman in the time she spends watching and ruminating on her family's actions, at one point getting to experience that womanhood in a way she never imagined. Her mother Abigail is a dreamer, her wildness contained by domesticity, and after Susie's death she is a woman just going through the motions. Her emotional disconnect thereafter finds her having an affair followed by a move out west, voluntarily estranging herself from her husband and surviving children for years. Susie's father Jack grieves for her openly and often, something which makes it difficult for him to move on and his grief is made all the more affecting by Abigail's physical and emotional distance. Lindsey is a rock; already in the angst-ridden valley of adolescence, she sinks even deeper into disquiet, choosing neither to show nor share her personal agony with anyone. Buckley, only four at the time of Susie's death, begins to see as he matures how grief has weighed his family down and though equally saddened by his sister's passing becomes demonstrative about the importance of moving on when one day, much to his father's shock, he attempts to use Susie's clothes to fashion stakes for the tomato plants in his vegetable garden.
Sebold paints a most chilling portrait of George Harvey with his quiet demeanor, an aloofness coupled with an invented status as a widower the ideal facade for his perverse machinations. The reader is given a disturbing evolution of his unnatural urges and his habitual killing is made all the more unsettling by his composure and critical thinking throughout the entire process. The creepiness factor reaches an all-time high when Sebold has him reflecting on Susie's murder one evening while taking a shower, the author smothering his meditation with twisted pleasure: "As he scoured his body in the hot water of his suburban bathroom...he felt thoughts of me then. My muffled scream in his ear. My delicious death moan. The glorious white flesh that had never seen the sun, like an infant's, and then split, so perfectly, with the blade of his knife. He shivered under the heat, a prickling pleasure creating goose bumps up and down his arms and legs." (pg. 50)
The novel has many poignant moments, particularly when Susie travels to a special part of heaven and meets all of Harvey's other victims, the girls shedding tears as they share their stories. For me, it was the rekindling of affections between Jack and Abigail that moved me to tears as well as Abigail's absolution as she stood in Susie's room, grieving for her one last time as she professed her love. Sebold draws upon her own harrowing experience (which she wrote about extensively and graphically in her 1999 memoir "Lucky") for the catalyst of this story, her memories and feelings channeled through her protagonist (Sebold was raped at knife-point in an underground tunnel, and a girl who had been raped at that location prior to her was murdered and dismembered). It is with this realization that "The Lovely Bones" ceases to be just a well-written and unconventional novel about a restless spirit - it becomes a subtle yet rousing exploration of the author's own soul.
Bottom line: Great contemporary fiction doesn't come better than this. Sebold has a way with words which few authors possess and "The Lovely Bones" will have you ruminating on the possibilities of life after death as well as the perseverance of the people we will inevitably leave behind.
Summary of The Lovely Bones: Deluxe Edition
This deluxe trade paperback edition of Alice Sebold's modern classic features French flaps and rough-cut pages.Once in a generation a novel comes along that taps a vein of universal human experience, resonating with readers of all ages. The Lovely Bones is such a book - a phenomenal #1 bestseller celebrated at once for its narrative artistry, its luminous clarity of emotion, and its astoniishing power to lay claim to the hearts of millions of readers around the world.
"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 eath 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 traged and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy
"A stunning achievement." -The New Yorker
"Deeply affecting. . . . A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time." -New York Times
"A triumphant novel. . . . It's a knockout." -Time
"Destined to become a classic in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird. . . . I loved it." -Anna Quindlen
"A novel that is painfully fine and accomplished." -Los Angeles Times
"The Lovely Bones seems to be saying there are more important things in life on earth than retribution. Like forgiveness, like love." -Chicago Tribune
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
Look Inside the Motion Picture The Lovely Bones (Paramount, 2010)
(Click on each image below to see a larger view)
 Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon |  Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon |
 Mark Wahlberg as Jack Salmon |  Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon and Director Peter Jackson |
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