Rating: 
Summary: Sad and Moving...
Review: Once i started to read this book i could not put it down. alice sebold did a wonderful job showing the readers the victims point of view. this book has moment that make you cry and laugh, which makes the book all that better. i don't know why people are writing bad reviews for this book, maybe they should read it again?!?
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyed it, ALMOST
Review: Somewhere online, I read a segment of this book and was anxious to read the rest of the book. It held my attention right along and I enjoyed it very much. The kind of book I looked forward to getting back to everyday. Until near the end. It got quite contrived. (Not wanting to ruin it for anyone else...)The chapter with the physical scene with Ray & "Ruth" felt tacked on. Almost like Ms. Sebold was told she needed to spice it up a little in case they made a movie of it. ... On the whole though I enjoyed the book. She handled a delicate topic well with interesting views.
Rating:
Summary: A page turner
Review: This was the first book I've read by Alice Sebold. I felt the book was good, and it intrigued me to read more. There were parts that dragged on towards the end, and could possibly have been omitted. I think Sebold's description of the murder was graphic and powerful. Her description of the killer gave me the creeps, and demonstrates the strength of her writing. She provided information on his childhood to clue readers into what type of environment produced him. Reading about the murderer and his crime made me nervous since I'm a parent. Sebold did an excellent job of showing how deeply and differently grief can impact a family. I thought her descriptions of heaven were original and creative. The part of the book about Susie falling to earth was taken straight from "Ghost." There were also elements in the book that reminded me of the movie "City of Angels." These concepts weren't completely original, but then, who is completely original? Overall, the book is well written, and held my interest.
Rating: 
Summary: A Real Disappointment
Review: Overhyped. I am amazed that so many critics lauded its literary merits. While the narrative device is clever, the writing is mediocre, the characters are poorly defined and by the end the plot turns to the ridiculous. The first few chapters were good though...would have made a strong short story...
Rating:
Summary: Drivel
Review: This book is complete and utter drivel. It is poorly written and inconsistant. I don't understand how or why it is on the best-seller list. The author uses every overly dramatic movie-of-the-week cliche in this book. My theory as to why this book is so popular is that some marketing/advertising hot-shot remembered this piece of [junk] sitting on his or her shelf when the rash of missing girls occurred and decided to capitalize on these tragedies. A huge marketing campaign took place with this book when it first came out. There were even TV commercials for it. I find the whole timing of this book's popularity very disturbing.
Rating:
Summary: Read her autobiography
Review: Alice Sebold's autobiography, Lucky, is amazing. It's some of the best writing I've read in a very long time! I lent it to someone who'd read Lovely Bones, and she read Lucky in a weekend, returned it to me saying she was going to buy copies of it for her family members.
Rating: 
Summary: A view on life we haven't had before
Review: This book is so many things packed into one: lovely, thought-provoking, anger-stirring, frustrating, funny, sad, melancholy, hopeful, helpless, silly, deep and so on.It shoots for greatness, and in my opinion, it falls short. But only a little short. The subject matter seems like it would be repellant. Who wants to read about a raped and murdered 14 year old girl who watches her family go through the incredibly painful grieving process that transforms them all? There's a nice read for the beach, huh?!? But, Susie Salmon, our narrator, is seldom actually bitter about her death. She is in heaven (more on that later) and can move through the lives of anyone she wants to, even into their thoughts, at will. She is always with the living, and she has such love for them that the horrendous grief her family goes through it filtered through this gauze of her love, and thus is made bearable for the reader. This doesn't mean the book it easy to read...quite the contrary. There are moments so shattering and immediate that you KNOW you're reading the truth. You think to yourself, "yep, that's perfectly believable, and I can even see myself doing it." For example, at one point, Susie tells us how she and her father spent many hours together working on making ships in bottles, something only the two of them ever took interest in in the Salmon family. But soon after Susie's murder, her father goes to his study and destroys all the ships in a fit of anguish. The scene is shattering, because we can imagine the depth of the man's torture that would drive him to such an act. What's great about the book is not how grief is depicted in the immediate aftermath of Susie's disappearance, but how that grief continues, and mutates and transforms over time. Over years. So many people are affected in ways that they probably can't even trace back to Susie's death, but Susie shows us how. How her sister ended up with her husband, because shortly after Susie's death, this boy gave her her first kiss to help her with her grief, and that moment bound them together from that point forward. And this wouldn't have happened without Susie's death. I hope you get the point. The book is deep at times, yet is sometimes dangerously sentimental and mushy. And near the end, there's "miraculous" event (no, nothing so amazing as Susie being resurrected...don't get carried away) which is beautiful on one hand, and on the other hand feels like a bit of a cheat. The book has struggled so hard to be "realistic," (even though we're clearly dealing with the otherworldly, since our narrator is speaking to us from heaven) that this segment skews the book's hard earned credibility. And the descriptions of what heaven is like are a bit iffy. Sometimes it kind of makes sense, and sometimes I feel the author is just skirting the issue of giving us a more fleshed out idea of her vision of heaven. In some ways, Susie is so engrossed with earth, she doesn't take the time to really learn about heaven, but even so, I wanted a bit more coherence to those brief segments. (Although there is a nice moment when her dog joins her.) My criticisms are fairly minor. In my mind, this book is the best piece of literature dealing with the relationships between the dead and the living since OUR TOWN, and that's saying alot. There may have been loftier works (C.S. Lewis' THE GREAT DIVORCE comes to mind) but few works are so utterly engrossing and moving. Once you're two sentences into this book, it's tough to put down. I read it in near record time for me. I'm glad I got on the bandwagon for this well-deserved best seller.
Rating: 
Summary: Well Written, But.....
Review: I'll make this short and sweet. It's a well written book, conceived in a poetic style that I have not seen in many books of late. The idea of a girl looking down upon her family after her untimely death is a very captivating and unexpected way to tell a story. So, why so few stars? Freudianism. The book starts as what is a fun, yet believable flight of fantasy, and lands just short of vulgar. It was a good story gone horribly wrong. By the end of the book, you'll have lost interest, being alienated by the blunt sexual references that are, in the end, more than just references. If you decide to read it, you'll be enchanted, then greatly disappointed...
Rating:
Summary: Simply Moving
Review: Except for the Susie's description of her rape and murder, it's not a grisly book. Sebold has done her research well, especially in how society helps people cope with the murder of a child/sibling. You find yourself rooting for the younger sister and her junior high boyfriend to marry right out of college and for the boy Susie loved to make it with the arty girl that susie would have been close friends with. You also find yourself hoping the cop would get smart and listen to Susie's dad. And how do you help little Buck? Four years old and your big Sis murdered? Alice Sebold could easily become as great as Ridley Pearson and Susan Conant...
Rating:
Summary: Feminine Drivel
Review: I got two words for you, Alice Sebold - be bold. I know it rhymes, but so what. When I read The Lovely Bones, I felt like tossing my cookies, if you know what I mean. Let's face it - this is a chick book - nothing more and nothing less. It's about as P.C. and feminine as you can get. After a while, I began to skim through the less interesting parts - i.e. the whole book - and found it utterly predictable in its theme and outcome. I'm sure it'll be made into an equally horrific and abominable movie - so just wait 'til then, unless you really want to throw your money away or are forced to read this for some godforsaken women's book club. I'm sure Alice had good intentions, but, as is often said, the road to hell also was paved with good intentions.
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