Rating: 
Summary: Great start..falls flat..goofy climax..still, worth reading
Review: The book started out fantastic. Original concept, disturbing and well paced. Then, after about the first quarter, it meanders around too much.While one reviewer thought that "Susie" was unreal, I felt it was the little brother's character that was too much like an adult speaking like a 4 year old. The mother's character goes through some believable "falls", but the writer spends too much time rationalizing and defending her tragic fall from grace. Halfway through, it does come back to a decent pace, and has many moving chapters. Personally, I have no problem with the lack of closure with the killer, and I don't mind what she did on her "return trip". It seemed appropriate to me, and fit the story... But... the whole "return trip" idea itself seemed goofy. I think this book would have done perfectly fine without the whole mystic Ruth angle. Overall, I did like this book, and suggest reading it (have some tissues ready), but it was not a great book, or a GREAT book, and I am stingy with the stars (c'mon, you'va gotta earn em folks, let's stop giving 5 stars to every decent book you read ;)
Rating:
Summary: Good start, ran out of gas
Review: The first two thirds of the book are great. The premise is very interesting, and it is carried off well in the beginning. But then it becomes a trudge to the end, and the end is disappointing.
Still, it's a good read; just not quite satisying.
The problem is a common one--great idea, good start, but inability to really carry it off. That's the main difference between popular books and literature--good literature is much more uniform from beginning to end.
Rating:
Summary: Missing a Bone or Two
Review: Intrigued by the unique first person perspective of one's murder seen after the fact, a relevant topic, along with several recommendations with several warnings that the ending may disappoint, I decided to pick up this popular novel. Indeed, the lead pulls the reader in immediately. It is a page turner, quickly read and digested. I can understand the book's general popularity, for reasons already stated, as well as the reasons for the warnings of a disappointment at the finish line. I would add that the narrative itself was a bit disappointing to me in that it read nothing like a 14 year old, everything like an adult woman speaking as a 14 year old, thinly disguised. I, too, was disappointed in the final chapters. Even fantasy scenarios must keep feet on ground, and this temporary exchange of spirits to recapture a lost innocence pulled at my suspended disbelief a bit too much. Aw, come on.... ! The scene provides no redemption and should be entirely cut. An occasional flair of fresh phrasing kept the book above average, however. How family members of the murdered girl each grieve in their own way was well written and explained. Even the limbo state of the murdered girl's soul was believable. I enjoyed the book, although not as much as I had hoped. I would recommend it, if with some reservation.
Rating:
Summary: Ultimately Unsatisfying
Review: Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones has been on the New York Times Bestseller List in hardcover for close to 2 years. I wanted to see what the big deal was. Having finished the book, I still don't know what the book's mass appeal is about. Don't get me wrong: Sebold knows how to turn a well-crafted sentence. She's brilliant here and there. And she has a good grasp of capturing and showing painful human emotions and the slow, sorry slide into oblivion that a family often makes after a tragedy like the rape and murder of Susie Salmon, the story's narrator. But for this reader, the book was ultimately unsatisfying. The cord running throughout the entire book, in my mind at least, was "how are they going to figure out who killed Susie, and when?" That's why I kept reading. I kept waiting for it to happen. But I had no closure. Near the end (warning: spoiler), Susie breaks through to the other side and what does she do? Years after her death, what does Susie want? Does she seize a rare opportunity to tell who killed her, where her body is buried, and where the killer is? She could; Susie is the standard omniscient narrator. But she doesn't. She uses her One Big Chance to get laid by her first almost-love. Oddly, that event gives some closure, as if to say it's okay that the killer got away if the victim is "over it." But for me, the ending was a disappointment. There was no justice, no meaningful irony. There was irony, but it was too neat, almost trite, I'd say. The daily news is filled with stories of women and children who are brutally murdered by perpetrators who are never found. I understand Alice Sebold was a rape victim herself and told her story in her first book, "Lucky," said to be so named because the police told her she was "lucky" to be alive, because another woman had been raped and murdered in the exact place where she was attacked. Alice knows the real deal because she's lived through it. But I was hoping, right up until the end, that the cops (who get so close) were going to catch Susie's murderer. Who knows? Maybe Alice was telling the story of the woman who was killed where she was raped. Maybe he got away, too. I'm glad I read The Lovely Bones, but I felt cheated at the end. If I died and went to a heaven like Susie's, I'd be one angry ghost. I'd come back and kill the murderer myself, just for banishing me to such a lackluster eternity. Maybe readers felt better about Susie's death, given the ending of the story. Not this reader. This work of fiction had an ending that read too much like real life for me.
Rating: 
Summary: The Lovely Bones is Purely Skeletal in Content
Review: I wanted to love this book. It had been near the top of my books to read list for almost a year and the reviews on Amazon finally persuaded me to go out a grab a copy. After all, the story was intriguing and I was looking forward to reading something that was a little more complex. In the end, the only value I got out of the novel was a shelf decoration. The story had all the makings of an emotional tour de force, yet the only emotion it ever evoked from me was utter frustration after about the 103rd page when I finally gave up on the book. What surprised me the most was how overly-simplistic the writing was. The problem was having the story told through the eyes of a fourteen-year old. As a result, too many passages were devoted to what was seen rather than what was felt by the characters. The book was like snapshots that only left me yearning for the story behind the pictures. A novel dealing with a little girl's murder and how it affects her loved ones deserved to be told with more insight than it was in The Lovely Bones. What a disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Coming of Age in Heaven
Review: I found The Lovely Bones to be an interesting read. One would expect a story that starts with such tragedy to be depressing, but instead it ends up being a story of hope. The story comes as close to a happy ending as possible, given the premise. I felt that the loose ends were tied up a bit too nicely at the end, though I was glad to read a story that wasn't all doom and gloom. It was a welcome change, since so many authors are opting for disturbing over satisfying these days. Comparisons have been made between this book and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I think that such comparison may be a bit generous, but the book does have a similar feel. I'm sure that is due in large part to the fact that it is told from the perspective of a young girl. The element of this book that I thought was most masterfully done was growth that Susie experiences by watching her family. I also thought that the author's view of heaven was well done. It was believable and sufficiently vague, so as to avoid spouting some concrete notion of heaven that might have alienated some readers. In the end, I recommend this book. It's a pretty easy read and it's an interesting new take on the traditional "coming of age" story.
Rating: 
Summary: A superb novel!
Review: Although the beginning of this novel is ugly and horrifying, the story is beautiful and inspiring. Alice Sebold has written her characters, especially the main character Susie Salmon, so well and with such insight that I felt I knew them. Several parts of the story moved me to tears, only the second book out of the thousands I've read to do so. Rarely does a book this powerful and emotionally riveting come along. Thank you Ms Sebold for bringing Susie and her family into my life.
Rating:
Summary: Emotional
Review: In Lovely Bones Sebold puts so much emotion into it. She makes the characters so real. It got me thinking what my heaven would be like and who i would see. Susie Salmon was a 14 year old living her life like any average teenager. After a horrible encouter with a cerial killer who was her neighbor. Susie finds herself dead, on the cold snowy day in December 1973. Her killer Mr. Harvey hides the body he had raped and murdered in a very clever place, leaving only two people who knew the truth of what happened to Susie Salmon that cold winter day. Susie watches her family from her heaven that consisted of only her simplest dreams. she watches them as if it were a movie, sitting there being able to do nothing to help find them find the missing peices to the puzzle. Susie could not walk up to them and tell them that where her body was or who had killed her. She simply had to sit and pray that they would soon find out who the killer was. Susie watched over her family through their sad loss. As her dad would stop at nothing to find out who the killer was, and her mom just huddled up in a ball away from everything, and her sister who was only one year younger then her deal with her sisters death and the rumars kids spread at school. Susie also watched as her much younger brother tried to understand what had happened to his sister. As time goes on her death becomes less and less imprtant. The detectives search but get tired as they are getting no closer, but her death huants Mr. Harvey.
Susies still tries to talk to people, and get real close to a girl named Ruth they never really knew eachother but they have a connection that helps ruth with trying to find out who killed Susie. This is a story that willl touch you and make you appreciate life a little more.It may alsotake away some of your fears of death, and give you a little courage to move on.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much Hype, Not Enough Substance
Review: I was not impressed with this incredibly promoted, overly hyped novel. The subject matter is of course, controversial and I felt it could have been handled alot better. The narrative was awkward in places and was basically 8th grade reading level. Not impressed.
Rating:
Summary: beautiful bones
Review: This book pulled me in from the very start. Sebold does a wonderful job of breaking away the shell that is Suzie Salmon. She takes you deep into her soul and the heart of her family. I felt every emotion that Suzie did. The only fault of this book is the false hope that people can come back from the dead to fulfill fantasies. It was a beautiful moment in the book, but it was incredibly sad because its not real. We only get one chance at this life. Its unsettling to think that passed souls just sit and watch over family, while craving to be part of the world again. Everyone glamorizes death into saying that heaven is perfect. This book makes you think twice about why heaven might be. I commend Sebold and recommend this book to anyone with compassion. This a book where you must let go of preconcieved notions and just take in the words for what they are.
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