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Book Review:
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. This was before milk carton photos and public service announcements, she tells us; back in 1973, when Susie mysteriously disappeared, people still believed these things didn't happen.
THE LOVELY BONES
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Publisher: Little Brown & Company
Publishing Date: July 2002
In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death, and her own adjustment to the strange new place she finds herself. (It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing set.)
With love, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie watches her family as they cope with their grief - her father embarks on a search for the killer, her sister undertakes a feat of amazing daring, her little brother builds a fort in her honor - and begin the difficult process of healing.
In the hands of a brilliant new novelist, and through the eyes of her winning young heroine, this story of seemingly unbearable tragedy is transformed into a suspenseful, touching, even funny novel about family, memory, love, heaven, and living.
[A special shout-out goes to Sheena, who has impeccable taste in books.]
As a penniless student, you can understand my weird habit of killing time in the university bookstore by reading books that I was too broke to buy. I wasn't proud of it, but then again, I had to find a way to beat the system that had put me into debt for the next ten years of my adult life.
This book had always been at the top of my list, ever since I gleamed its strange title from the New York Times Bestseller's List some time ago. I had resolved to read it despite the fact that I had incurred a hefty fine on my library card. And so, for a month straight, and with the transit system permitting, I went to the university bookstore half and hour before class and read to my heart's content. Luckily, no self-serving bookstore clerk kicked me out, but this was no way to truly enjoy this book.
And so Sheena, feeling my broke student dilemma but by no means as ghetto as me, lent me her own copy of The Lovely Bones.
If you want the Cliff's Notes version of The Lovely Bones, just think about it as a book about life - of having life, and of losing life; of living, and of dying; of loss and of gain.
The book opens with a jarring first chapter, and that is enough. Susie Salmon, the little girl who would never grow up to become a woman, is brutally raped and killed by her neighbour. She recounts this as she sits up in heaven, a child's utopia complete with playgrounds, friends, and friendly dogs. Sebold paints an otherwise horrific sequence of events with a soft, delicate touch. What could have been an exploitative opening is softened by Susie's honest and candid narrative.
As Susie sits up in heaven, we see what she sees. Her father, the loss excruciating, trying to find her killer. Her mother, a shell of a woman, seeking comfort in denial. Her younger sister hardening herself to the world. Her little brother attempting to grasp why Susie has been gone for months. As the family falls apart, Susie wants nothing more than to tell them that she's safe.
We are also introduced to Ruth, a shy classmate who has a strong connection to Susie - so strong that she can feel Susie's presence in the cornfield where Susie died. And Ray, the first and last boy to kiss Susie, and the first suspect in her murder. It is Susie's relationship with Ray that is the most captivating. Sebold captures the essence of adolescent love in such a beautiful and mature way that it's hard to fathom why Ray took so long to kiss Susie. Even though it was only for a fleeting moment, Susie's death shapes and changes Ray's life as much as it does with her family.
Years pass, and still Susie's killer is not found. Susie's mother starts an affair with the detective on the case - a vulnerable moment on her part, something to fill the void - that is perhaps the weakest link in this book. Although Sebold tries to explain as best she can, the mother's character comes across as more of a bored housewife than a grieving mother. But even in her control, Sebold never uses Susie as a morality sounding board in anyone's actions. Susie simply watches and hopes that her family will pick up the pieces.
Susie's younger sister, Lindsey, grows up into a vibrant and vivacious young woman who slowly heals with the love of her boyfriend. The love that the sisters hold for each other is touching, surreal, and moving. Lindsey is no longer the sister that Susie knows, and yet, from up in heaven, she is always watching over her.
The book never veers off into a murder-mystery, although there are several suspenseful moments that Sebold throws at us with a simple turn of the page, and that propel the story and its characters into deeper character-development territory. Instead, she focuses on the lives that have been broken by this crime, and how their lives intertwine and weave so that one hand always holds the other.
Sebold's narrative tongue is captivating, touching, and refreshing. Few authors would ever be able to capture loss and hope in one book so effortlessly. Her prose is sentimental but not overly maudlin, sensational at times but not extraordinarily so. In its conclusion, everything is tied up quite neatly - a detriment to some, a perfect ending to others.
The Lovely Bones offers a glimmer of hope in a world where atrocities occur on a daily basis. It never pretends to exist in a perfect world, but rather takes tragedy and spins conviction and salvation out of it. Even for the most jaded at heart, this book will bring your faith back. C.Ho.
THE LOVELY BONES:
