Second Quarter Outside Reading Book Review.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Little, Brown and Company, 2002
Genre: Fiction

In The Lovely Bones, fourteen year old girl, Susie Salmon is murdered. She tells the story from heaven. As she tells the story, she looks down on earth at her friends and family trying to move on without her, and the one who murdered her trying to cover up what he did.

"The Lovely Bones is one of the strangest experiences I have had as a reader in a long time, and one of the most memorable. Painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief."

-- Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Susie is faced to see her family and friends moving on. When she was alive on earth she fell in love with a boy names Ray. He has a hard time moving on because he finds himself in the center of an amazing event. Sebold also wrote books like Lucky and The Almost Moon.

The Lovely Bones allows you to see what Susie sees when she's in heaven looking down on Earth. It gives you a feeling of what heaven is like and how hard, it really is to move on after a love one has passed.

"I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it." (p. 213)

I really did enjoy Sebold's novel. I haven't read one of her novels before but I wouldn't mind reading another one by her. Abby Foster had recommended this book for me to read, and im happy I did read it. That's because Sebold made it feel like you were in Susie's shoes in heaven, trying to figure out her own murder.