The Lovely Bones - Softcover

Sebold, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159413023X ISBN 13: 9781594130236

Publisher: Large Print Press, 2004

Synopsis

A New York Times BestsellerWhen we first meet Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. As she looks down from that strange new place she tells us, in the fresh and spirited voice of a fourteen-year-old, a tale that is both haunting and full of hope. Susie watches life continuing after her brutal death: her loved ones holding out hope she'll be found, her killer covering his tracks. As months pass without leads, she sees her family contorted by loss. With compassion, longing, and a growing understanding, she sees them face the worst -- then, in time, pass through grief and begin to mend.

About this title

Review:

On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.

As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue".

The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow".

Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com

Review:

"Set in a heaven as real and possible as the earth is mysterious and shifting, THE LOVELY BONES explores, with clear-eyed affection and wit, the romance of family life, the shy, funny turbulence of adolescence and the painful tracks love and loss make through our world." --Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

About this edition

• Publisher: Large Print Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 159413023X
• ISBN 13: 9781594130236
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 532