The Bottom Line: Probably two and a half stars....but it's an interesting read that I think a lot of people will probably enjoy--I just saw it as very flawed.
JiggyJay's Full Review: Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones
Lovely Bones was very interesting in many different facets. For one, it was a different take on, what could have been, a very ill-told, mundane story, but given the unique narrative style, it offered something special for the reader. An inside look on the murder of a young girl and her following perspectives from her viewpoint in heaven while watching her family (and her murderer) cope with her death.
She really brings the whole plot out onto the forefront: a little girl was murdered, said character is the narrator of the story, and how did this happen? I thought that the build-up would be more gradual, but the reader is thrown into the mix quite quickly. Even Susie's (said girl) death is in the first fifty pages so it doesn't really leave you wondering how it happened or anything like that, but after the death the number one tension and suspense is whether or not this guy that murdered her is going to be caught or not and what else is he going to do.
Sebold introduces us to all of her family within the first number of pages, but seemed to stick close to her sister, Lindsey, and her brother, Buckley. Even more so she seems to take on this guardian angel role as she's following them for such a time. She's an omniscient narrator who is watching all of the people that her life (and death) affected from her own heaven (much in the vein of Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come).
The novel plays out like a murder mystery with the deceased and supernatural narrator leading the story and making you wonder just how this man is going to be caught for his crime(s) and what more could happen in this story that hasn't already happened. I think the main plot development (the death) was just the beginning to a story with more meat to it. A story like this must have more conflicts in it because her death must not have been the big cheese-there must be more surprises on the way, so I think that there's a cloud of mystique behind the narrative.
I think that Sebold's intentions surrounding the novel could have been cathartic in the way that she wanted to get a lot of things off of her chest given her history with the similarity it has with the book, but halfway through the novel I found her breathy, adolescent drawl to be quite overbearing and written in a way that made me think that she knew that people were going to really embrace the book. She wrote a big set up for the book that just puttered out at the very end with a certain death scene that was very childish and some developments with characters that were so unbelievable (even within this story's standpoint) that it really deflated the novel. And with that said, there wasn't any real meaty climax that brought any real closure to the story and in the end, it did not leave me satisfied.
Overall, the book was written with a very interesting concept, but that concept wore thin about halfway through. Sebold never really got that first half's intensity back by the end of the novel and while I would recommend this book to my friends and I'll probably see the movie adaptation in the winter, a lot of things bothered me about the book. It's uneven in a lot of places, it was hard for me to truly care about the characters, and it was written very poorly by Sebold. The story isn't a ghost story or a ‘whodunit', but it's definitely not a preachy Christian novel. It brings Christian themes to an almost secular plain where it doesn't step on anyone's beliefs, but tells that Heaven is a place and that's where the main character is. The Lovely Bones was an interesting book and a quick read, but in the end I couldn't tell if it was preteen fiction or popular fiction.
Once in a generation a novel comes along that taps a vein of universal human experience, resonating with readers of all ages. THE LOVELY BONES is such...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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