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Title/Author

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

Average Review Rating Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)
Book Details

Publisher : Picador

Published : 2009

Copyright : Alice Sebold 2002

ISBN-10 : PB 0-330-45772-1
ISBN-13 : PB 978-0-330-45772-9

Publisher's Write-Up

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighbourhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon.

Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet...

The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places.

About the Author:
Alice Sebold is the author of the number one bestseller The Lovely Bones, the memoir Lucky, and a second novel, The Almost Moon. She lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold.

'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose... The Lovely Bones is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing.'

The Times

'Moving and compelling... It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you. I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed.'

Sunday Telegraph

 

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Reader Reviews

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Review by Annett Grosser-Rogoff (310713) Rating (9/10)

Review by Annett Grosser-Rogoff
Rating 9/10
The Lovely Bones is the powerful debut novel by Alice Sebold about 14-year-old Susie Salmon who is raped and murdered by a serial killer. It is written from the perspective of the girl who watches her devastated family, the detective working on her case and her murderer from heaven.

Susie's heaven is made of typical teenage dreams. There is a school but no teachers, she just has to go in for her favourite classes and the boys don’t tease her. However, this magical set-up does not conceal her struggle to accept her death and her desire to cling to the Living. She watches her family over the years trying to cope in their own way with the loss they have encountered. Her father becomes obsessed with trying to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother clings to his babyhood and her younger sister is the mirror Suzie sees herself in. Suzie lives the life she was betrayed from through Lindsey, realising missed opportunities and appreciating the ones she was lucky enough to enjoy while she was still alive.

The story takes you on an emotional rollercoaster. There are moments of joy and laughter, tears to be cried, anger at the unfairness of life and fear of having to go through a similar loss. The novel does not have a religious purpose even though it describes heaven as it could be in a very graphic way. It’s clearly fictional, very well written, easy to relate to and an absolute pleasure to read.
Annett Grosser-Rogoff (31st July 2013)

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