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Summary: A Very Moving and Memorable Book! -- Worth Your Time!
Review: I can't recall reading any other novel that made me think about the story even after I'd finished reading the last page. I'm not sure whether or not it is the timing of this book's release, with the recent kidnappings, rapes and murders of real children across the country. Maybe it is the unique way the story is told, from a perspective I'd certainly never encountered. Not being a deeply spiritual person, I don't often think of a heaven or an afterlife. The way Susie's afterlife is portrayed is somehow logical. I was briefly reminded of the movie Ghost at times, and also of Defending Your Life to a lesser extent. Alice Sebold seems to leave out unnecessarily graphic or gory details while still describing the unthinkable nature of the murder. So few words, yet more than adequate. Instead, she thoroughly and beautifully describes how Susie perceives her heaven and how bittersweet her view of the living seems to be. From Susie's first love to her mother's eyes, Sebold paints quite a beautiful picture. This is a remarkable novel, certainly worthy of your time. Another book I enjoyed: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez. Two Great Amazon picks!
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Summary: Good Book
Review: Good book, definitely worth reading. This books seems almost poetic in a way, i like Alice Sebold's way of writing. Anyway, good book, i would recomend it.
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Summary: Great novel!!
Review: I'm sure many readers have read the bestseller of 2002! This is a story of Susie Salmon who is raped and murdered. This book is haunting at some points. Alice Sebold did a great jop writing this novel. This is her first novel hope she writes another bestseller. The movie rights were sold go to imdb.com and it'll be a movie so let's hope it stays faithful to Sebold's book!
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Summary: Book Report
Review: My mom and I read a book recently, called The Lovely Bones, by Alice Seabold. It is written in the form of a fiction novel, and would be considered to have a genre of horror, suspense and tragedy, since the book is just one big tragedy after another. The book's copyright date is 2002, which would make it relatively new, yet the book is set in 1973, in a small town in the United States in which a girl is murdered. In this essay, I will explain the main character of the book, give a short summary about it and identify and explain the theme, as well as give my own opinion about the book. The main character in the book is Susie Salmon, who is a 14 year old girl living in 1974. She is skinny, with long blonde hair, and blue eyes, and could be described as pretty. She has good grades in school and over analyses every situation, which can sometimes get to be annoying, since the book is written in first person, and she is narrating it. She has a very friendly behaviour, and she is pretty confident about everything. Also, she is a too outgoing, which is what led her to be raped. In my opinion, she lacked decision-making skills and self-awareness, but because of this, her character is very interesting. The book is written in the first person with Susie Salmon narrating it. It all begins with her going with a complete stranger to his special place, where he rapes and killer's her. After that, Susie goes to heaven and describes how everything works in heaven, which in my opinion reflected what the author thought of heaven. That allowed me to get to know a little about the author, and what feelings she tries to transmit as she writes. During the whole book, Susie describes what she sees as she looks over her family, and describes how they get over her death, and how each member of the family carries on with their lives. The book's main conflict is that no one knows, or even suspects who the killer is; No one, that is except the father, Jack. This makes everyone in the neighbourhood think he is mad, and makes his wife cheat on him with the detective, Mr. Fennerman. The climax of the book is definitely when the mother, who ran away from home and abandoned her two other children, returns, because from then on, everybody's problems start resolving themselves. The main theme of the book, however, is the girls death, and all of the problems created by her death, especially within her family. As she watches on heaven, her family begins to break apart. Her sister completely loses contact with her parents, even though they are still living together. The mother abandons her old life and her children and runs off with some man to California. The father, who is the only one trying to solve the mystery of her daughters murder, is caught between insanity and loneliness, as no one helps him catch the murderer. All of these problems start creating more problems themselves, making the girl's death, along with all of these initial problems, the main theme of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to others, because even though the content is depressing, and the interpretation of heaven is farfetched, it is the insanity and sadness of the book which makes it so enjoyable to read. I consider the main idea of the book important and worth studying, because rape and murder is something that does happen in the real world, and we must find ways to prevent them. It is also a great book to help you see that not all families are perfect, yet anyone can find a way to happiness. The main idea of the book, is however, not convincingly explained, since the main character lacked self-awareness, and accompanied a perfect stranger to the middle of a cornfield. I do not believe that any 14 year old girl would be so stupid, as to go with a stranger to an isolated area. In this essay, I have explained the main character of the book, gave a short summary about it, identified and explained the theme of the book, and gave my own opinion about it. The book itself included many morals, which can be very useful in real life, such as never fully trusting strangers, and that anyone can find happiness somehow. Some aspects of the book were idiotic and unrealistic, but it is those frustrating moments, mixed with a great feeling of depression, which made this such a great book. My mother's opinion on the book:
I find that there are several topics that are very difficult for parents to deal with, and one of them is definitely the death of a child. This feeling is intensified if the subject we are dealing with involves rape and violent murder. So I find that reading a novel that deals with these subjects can be a chilling experience. I found The Lovely Bones to be a book that was hard to read, not only because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, but I didn't agree with Alice Seabold's interpretation of Heaven. I found it to be more a wishful appreciation of what Heaven can be like than the creation of a Fantasy.
Death is definitely a complicated subject to deal with, and the family complications that arose from the murder of the main character were perhaps one of the issues that I found interesting. On the other hand, I enjoyed the nostalgic scenes that were set in the 70's. Particularly, the smoking area at school, which demonstrates that smoking was widely accepted, and the naivety of teenagers during that time period.
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Summary: THE LOVELY BONES
Review: This was a well written book. It makes you notice how important family is and what coping with death or murder is like for family members. Alice Sebold does a great job setting up the storyline and her descriptions of character and events throughout the story made it easier for me to visualize them. The storyline was good but I didn't like her descriptions of how life in heaven was. She described heaven as like living in the dorms in college. This book would have been better if Sebold focused more on the mystery of Susie's death. If you're a reader who enjoys reading about mysteries and drama, I would recommend this book to you.
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Summary: Haunting
Review: I had read several good reviews of this one, so I decided to read it for myself. Sebold, a rape survivor herself, tells the story of 14 year old Susie watching from heaven as her family tries to come to grips with her rape and murder. It was a beautiful, disturbing and memorable book. Her idea of heaven doesn't correspond with mine, but that's a minor point. The book was well-written--she goes back and forth in time with memories and yet it flows smoothly. If you think you can handle it, you should read this haunting novel.
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Summary: Beautifully Written...TERRIBLE Police Work!!
Review: Yes, this was a unique and wonderfully written book, and it made me think back to my junior high days, with the friendships, sports teams, families etc. But all the way through I thought "Are these police for real?" Because they seem completely at a loss to solve the crime, and later in the book truly pitiful! Also, the community, though appearing at a memorial service for the ghostly victim in heaven, did not seem as outraged by this atrocity as one might think..(And I grew up and still live in the Philadelphia suburbs locale). Nonetheless there were some wonderful moments and scenes, in the school, hospital, homes and anywhere else you can mention...But the large dump? Were these around in 1973, and could a family run this as a business? Seems unlikely. This pit would probably be condemned as unsafe! ..Some good reveiews here, so I'll keep mine short and simple, but my short criticisms point out some real flaws in what should ahve been a terrific book...Plus one wonders how this got all the PR and hype, when there are hundreds of others out there every year at least as well done as this!
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Summary: The Lovely Bones
Review: The Lovely Bones
By: Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones works as an odd story as Susie Salmon has to understand and learn to let go of her life on earth as she now has a new life in heaven. She studies her family below her and watches as they try to figure out who has murdered her and how it happened. 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 events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie backing her up. Throughout her new home in heaven she realizes that her enemy Ruth whom she did not get along with while she is a live is falling in love with her first kiss. Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy named Ray on Earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow." Susie is the narrator of this book telling the author about her life experiences that happened before her death and showing the events of her family and how they changed. In this novel, Ruth Conors has high beliefs on telling us all about the dead and how they truly talk about us. She states that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe." I enjoy this quote because it really gives out the true feelings of human beings. Although it's tough to loose a loved one, there's nothing wrong with having their spirits still with in us. Unfortunately, Susie's family does not take her death as well as she does. Susie's murderer Mr. Harvey is the perpetrator of many crimes and has been on the loose for years. He is in fact a serial killer, but has yet to be convicted of any of his wrongdoings, including Susie's death. Mr. Harvey is never caught, and her family never knows what happened to her. The other near missed takes place in an odd place when Susie switches places with Ruth and spends a few fleeting hours among the living. Instead of taking that opportunity to show Ray, her childhood flame, where her body is buried or spend her last time on earth with her family, she chooses to lose her virginity to Ray. The more time she spends in her Heaven, the more it evolves just as she does, mentally and emotionally as she can not do physically. Susie soon realized that she couldn't enter into the "real Heaven" until she first let's go of her attachments on Earth. It is this journey that is the central focus of the novel and it ultimately holds the story together. The theme of this book clearly shows that people are very different in understanding the loss of a loved one. Susie's family deals with the loss of her in many different ways. Her father doesn't want to believe that she's actually really gone and wants to know who's doing all of this. Her sister moves on and lives into her teenage years, her brother grows up not finding out till later that she's actually gone, and her mother has an affair with the investigation cop and ends up leaving her family behind. The characters in this book fit perfectly. Susie is a hometown girl who doesn't know much but understands her death clearly better than anyone else. Her father enjoyed building bottled ships, and spending his time with Susie and much as he could. Susie's mother gives all hope up on finding the person who murdered Susie, and her brother and sister move on with the child life not realizing what's actually going on. In my own opinion I loved this book. I wanted to skip pages just to get to the end to see who killed Susie and if they ever find out who did it. Every day I wanted to read and learn more and more about how the life of losing some one really affects a family in real life. If I had to rate this book I would give it a nine. The only flaw about this book is the fact about how it ends. I really thought that they would give out more details and a different ending but they didn't. I figured that maybe the family would get to grow stronger and discover Susie's death. I would strongly advise every one to read The Lovely Bones. It's a very good book and you can learn many things' about life.
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Summary: Too "touched by an angel" for me...
Review: I have to say that I did read this the whole way through, and that alone says something good. How happy I was though to see that other readers shared my feelings that this book just started out so amazing, and then went south with the whole body inhabitation thing and all. The first 100 pages, I was thinking man 'o man I'm just loving this, and then something big time bad happened. How funny that it has done so well... I guess the TV show I mentioned above did pretty peachy too.
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Summary: The Lovely Bones
Review: The Lovely Bones is based on a fourteen year old girl, Susie Salmon, who was murdered while going home. The story, told by Susie Salmon recalls the events that led up to her death. Still trying to cope with her death in heaven, Susie Salmon accepts the fact that she will no longer be with her friends and family, especially her mother, father, sister, and brother. The author Alice Seboid focus on how life can be easily taken away in just a matter of seconds. "Never take life for granted," is what Alice Seboid is trying to explain in her novel, The Lovely Bones. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in love, hope, tears, and happiness. Susie Salmon plays an excellent character in The Lovely Bones. It's as almost as Susie Salmon exist in reality and all that you can ever feel is pain from her disappearance. Once you read The Lovely Bones, you'll be sure to re-read it once more, it's a book that you can't seem to ever forget in your life. It will touch you in many ways that are unexplainable. Susie Salmon was a girl with so many hopes and dreams that a fourteen year old girl would only hope. Go to college, getting an education, being married, all of these were Susie Salmon dreams before she was taken away by her neighbor who raped and murder her while going back to home. Susie Salmon death was a tradegy that not only affected her family but a community as well. While coping through the disappearances of Susie Salmon, it brings Susie Salmon loved ones all together through a tradegy of a girl who lost her life at such a young age. This book becomes supensful thoughout the book while the search for Susie Salmon killer continues.
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