Rating: 
Summary: Stretched a little thin.
Review: The Lovely Bones is about a girl named Susie who is brutally raped and murdered when she is fourteen. Susie goes to her own individual heaven and she can see everything happening on earth. She can see her family greiving their loss and she can see her killer, a neighbor no one but her father is willing to suspect.Susie watches her classmates and younger brother and sister grow up while she remains the same fourteen year old girl. She is fixated on Earth below instead of trying to focus on her new life in heaven. What I found amazing was Susie's calm and general lack of emotion throughout the events of the the book. She is killed in a disturbing manner and Susie casually speaks of it as if she were describing someone making a peanut butter sandwich. She is far too comfortable with her own death and murder for my liking. It was certainly a unique book and a very good read, but the last hundred pages or so seemed very sluggish to me. It was almost as if the writer were told she needed to make the book longer, so she tacked on the pages. Thankfully it came together nicely in the last couple of chapters.
Rating: 
Summary: Spooky
Review: When you first meet Susie, she's talking from heaven. When I first heard about this book, I thought it was going to cause a fight because of religious matters. Somehow, it's the best book ever, with surpisingly happy ending. Only a true writer can do that and make it realsistic.
Rating:
Summary: A very emotional book
Review: This had to have been the best book i've ever read. You really feel as though you are a part of the story. There were times the book made me cry and times it made me smile. This book is about a girl who was murdered and she tells the story from heaven. She recounts on the lives of her family and friends and tells their stories as she sees them. I definitely recommend this book to everyone. May be a little too much for a younger reader.
Rating: 
Summary: A poser of a book as my teenage would say.
Review: Interesting premise but that is all. Characters are NOT deep they are just overdone. Take for example Mrs. Singh. 99.99% of Indian women do not smoke, especially one who has a last name of Singh. Women with last name "Singh" and 99% of them are Sikh do not smoke. It is against their religion. Take another character, the detective and infact take the whole amazingly stupid police department that he belongs to, a police department that never investigates the prime suspect's background, no finger prints, no searches, nothing. After watching numerous missing girls cases on TV, how believable is that I ask you! And then the murderer ups and goes missing easy as you please and does any one think that that might be a little strange! Does anyone go looking? Other than the real smart teenager of course. This is one of those overhyped books. I did not finish it. I could not. Inane!!! Stop supporting stuff like this. I am taking the book back to Costco and asking for my money back.
Rating:
Summary: Susie in the Sky, Some Diamonds
Review: Let me start this review by admitting that I would not have read this book if it were not for all the insistence of my much better half. She loved it and thought it would be a good vehicle to cultivate my undernourished female side. While it fell short of doing that and did fail to blow me away, I do think that Sebold wrote a rather good book with a number of strong passages. Since it is clear that the author did not set out to emulate the likes of Steele, Higgins-Clark or Grisham to write an absolute bestseller, I consider those negative reviews that blame the author for her success are beside the point. Asked what he thought was his best book the late Dutch master novelist Willem Frederik Hermans used to answer "Reminiscences of a Guardian Angel" (Herinneringen van een Engelbewaarder), because the use of an all-observing outsider to the plot yielded a narrative structure with a sheer wealth of plot angles. The Lovely Bones similarly derives a lot of its strength from the fantasy perspective of a young murder victim looking down on earth at the world that she left behind. The book opens with a number of very strong scenes surrounding Susie's brutal murder and follows the far from natural healing process in the Salmon family. While some of the fantasy aspects of the plot and the demise of the murderer are rather clunky, Sebold shows herself as a skilled stylist of whom a lot can be expected in the future. While many things "go" in fantasy I must say that the evolution of Susie's language skills in her private heaven is rather striking, when one compares passages from the beginning of the book with those from the end. But lets not fall to nitpicking. Sebold wrote a striking book that, surprise, surprise, taught many readers that there is another Universe behind Planet Grisham.
Rating:
Summary: You MUST buy this one!
Review: I can't stress enough how well-written this book is. 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. And THE LOVELY BONES is truly a must-read. I now understand why so many before me have given the book rave reviews. A truly remarkable tale, this book is among the best novels I've read in a very long time. Also recommended: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez
Rating:
Summary: LOVED IT!!!
Review: Although the story starts in kind of a disturbing way, the book is just too good to put down! It's a fast read, the charachters are easy to follow, and the story is super exciting! It certainly gets your heart pounding! I'm so glad I bought it!
Rating: 
Summary: Good, not great
Review: This book, which came highly recommemded from critics, is a highly creative novel dealing with death, grief, and the necessity of letting go. It's told by the lively Susie Salmon, someone who is dead by the end of the first chapter. She tells her story from a heaven of sorts, looking down on her family and charting their grief and gradual acceptance of her death. Amazingly, even with this subject matter, the book is never depressing, never too somber. I liked it, but I think I came into it expecting too much--thanks in large part to the glowing reviews. It didn't quite deliver, especially with the ending. It seemed like the author wanted to take a complex subject, which she at first dealt with fairly, and wrap it up in a neat little box with a bow on top. That is not to say I don't recommend it. I do. Just don't expect a masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: A must read kind of book
Review: Sometimes I resist reading the books that seem too popular, the ones that appear on everyone's top ten list. So began my response to The Lovely Bones. Then one day in my English 370 class, a student recommended the book to me, saying she had not read a book in years, and from the moment she opened this one, she couldn't put it down. At one point, she continued, her mom came into her room to find her reading well past midnight, tears streaming down her face. After a review like this, how could I not read the book? The Lovely Bones is the best book I have read in a long time. From the first page we are inside the narrator's head, watching through her eyes as the world goes on without her. Touching, horrifying, sad, hopeful--we experience all of these emotions and more as we navigate through the story from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl looking down from heaven. If you don't read any other book this year, read this one. Read it, and then go out and hug all those people who mean the world to you.
Rating:
Summary: A New Classic
Review: This book was a book that I had to get myself ready to read. I was worried that it was a horror that would keep me awake at night because of the terror.Instead you are awake contemplating the next chapter in the novel. But when I read it, it amazed me. I had never experienced something like it. It makes you feel like you can take anything, and it makes you hope that the story never ends. This book stays on your mind constantly, amzaed at the charecters strength and the writers words. I only wish I could read it forever. Do yourself a favor, read lovely bones.
| 
