The Lovely Bones

Rating:
Summary: A Tender and Beautiful Book
Review: With the storyline of a girl being brutally murdered, one would think that this would be a depressing and sad book. It is anything but. A tender and poignant tale, Susie watches her family struggling to move on with their lives after her death. Told with the sweet innocence of a 14 year old girl, it is one of the most touching, moving and incredible books I have read in a very long time. Simply put, an absolutely wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and Refreshing
Review: What a pleasure it is to actually have to pry myself away from a novel. This is one of the best novels I have read this year and would highly recommend it to any reader. While the premise initally appeared a bit morbid, the story is one of honest inflection and tremendous growth. I think every person could gain a little insight from this 14 year old girl.

Rating:
Summary: Not as good as I'd hoped, not as bad as I'd feared
Review: Newspaper and magazine reviewers do no one a favor when they over-hype a small book like this one. This novel is okay, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd known less about it and hadn't been primed for some sort of major literary miracle.

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite
Review: I am a writer and avid reader who found The Lovely Bones to be one of the most exquisitely rendered stories that I've ever read. This is a riveting, up-all-night book with characters who grow and mature and live and die in heartbreakingly real and beautiful ways. I can not give Alice Sebold's first novel high enough praise.

Rating:
Summary: Awestruck!
Review: This is one of the best novels I've ever felt. That's right...FELT. You can't just read this book - you live it, experience it, and you feel it as the story unfolds. I love it when this happens...when a story just peels off the pages and becomes less of a story, and more of a dream.
I read the first two chapters online ... and couldn't wait to get my copy of it. Those who say it doesn't "live up to the hype" should stop paying attention TO hype, and trust the story for what it is. Beautiful and haunting. Comforting and unsettling. Impossible and truthful. The ending does not fold up "neatly" ...
Read it for yourself and see.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good but not Great
Review: Alice Sebold has written an interesting and readable first novel with a very unusual view of life after death. Susie Salmon and her sister Lindsay are very memorable characters and her parents sympathetic. However, it was not the GREAT read the pre-release publicity led me to expect only a very good light read that made me think.

Rating:
Summary: Great First Novel
Review: I read this book in two days. It was great. I couldn't put it down. There were some parts in the middle I felt that dragged a little. But you wanted to continue reading to find out what happens next. What I most got out of the book, that we are not alone, that our dead loved ones talk to us all the time......we just need to listen. This book was a little bit of a mystery too. Who was the killer going to kill next? The story talks about how everyone deals with Susie's death. And Susie sits up in heaven looking down on Earth at everthing that is going on with her friends and family. The ending was the best part of the book. And with that I'll leave you to run out and get your own copy to read. I can't wait to see what Alice Sebold comes up with next. Great reading.....

Rating:
Summary: A lovely little book
Review: I abandoned a week-end to this book and didn't care because it is a voluptuously good read. Several passages in this were so startlingly beautiful that I had to put the book down for a moment to absorb them. The protagonist and narrator, a fourteen-year-old girl from a nice family, is savagely killed by a neighbor and goes to heaven. She describes her soul "shrieking from earth" in the violence of the act, adding that violent circumstances make the victim reach for death as one would a rope to swing out from danger. Just gorgeous stuff like that. I know these characters, this family. They are like my own and many other girls'. She wathches as her death transforms them all and she has such a beautiful young soul!! I recommend this book without reservation to anyone who enjoys a good read. Unique, charming, wistfully sad and never maudlin, sometimes funny (the tippling grandmother is a hoot).

Rating:
Summary: The Lovely Bones
Review: This book is incredible. I enjoyed it greatly. This is definently one of my favorite books. I couldn't put it down. You're thrown into someone elses mind, becoming wildly entertained, interested, and on the edge of your seat. The book is intense and the writing style unique. THis book reaches many different people on different levels. I highly recommend reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Susie: A Unique Storyteller
Review: The Lovely Bones is a book I couldn't put down until I was finished and I didn't want it to end. Sebold's device of having Susie, the murder victim, tell the story from heaven gives us a unique viewpoint of the effect of her murder and her loss on family, friends, and even people that Susie hadn't known in life. In life as individuals in such a situation go through the stages of grief, each focuses on his or her own response; their world becomes very small. The family in The Lovely Bones is no different; each starts on his or her journey of loss and coping, growing apart from each other. Susie the storyteller, is in the
position to see into the lives and thoughts not only of those who grieve for her loss, but also into those of her killer. She watches the growing apart of her family, and in her way, helps to effect their eventual coming back together. Along the way, she describes her experience of the afterlife and her growing knowledge, that although she is separated from her family, and that their grief will lessen and they will move on, she will forever be present in each of them. Susie, in heaven feels the separation as profoundly as her family and yearns for them and the experiences her early death has denied her. As in life, there is no easy resolution of the crime that takes her away from her family, but in many ways, the murder is the least of this story. As the sister of a teenaged murder victim, I read this book in her memory; she will have been gone for 31 years this month. In some way, her absence makes her forever present, but in a matter-of fact way, not that horribly empty torn away feeling that is the first response to a death. I found the story to be filled with wisdom, a gentle humor, a terrible sadness, and much truth in its description of the way grief changes us, but ultimately, Susie's voice comforted me. Grandma Lynn,the wisecracking, often tipsy, salt of the earth backbone of the family is priceless. I highly recommend this book for its unique perspective on a shattering event in the life of a family and a community.