Book Review: The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold

After all the hype surrounding this book, I was a bit disappointed by the end. It was an interesting take on death – a perspective I really grew to love – but the overall story, one of love, loss and letting go, was a bit underdeveloped for my tastes.

The book’s narrator is a 14 yr old girl who was raped and murdered in a cornfield near her home. She ascends to heaven and from there watches how her death affected those around her. 


Her father, who suspects the killer's identity, goes crazy with grief over the loss of his first-born, and his inability to do anything about it.

Her mother, who never wanted children, withdraws from her family and into an affair.


Susie's sister, Lindsey, fears the kids at school will forever define her by Susie's death, and her little brother, Buckley, struggles to understand the meaning of death.

The book has a strong first half as she commentates from heaven on how her death affects those she loves. The second half turns more into a ghost story when she revisits Earth.

My favorite lesson learned was the idea that heaven for her was always considered “my” heaven, as in everyone’s heaven is different based upon our own loves, comforts, and desires. I like this idea; it seems to make sense.

Overall, I was underwhelmed. I have not seen the movie yet, but the only person I know who has reports that it is “weird”.

"...Holly and I could be scanning Earth, alighting on one scene or another for a second or two, looking for the unexpected in the most mundane moment. and a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue on its way to heaven. The dead are never exactly seem by th eliving, by many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus. On my way out of Earth, I touched a girl named Ruth..."p. 36

"I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven,, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave." p. 120

"It's one of my secret pleasures, she admitted. After all these years I still love to watch the souls that float and spin in masses, all of them clamoring at once inside the air. I don't see anything, I said that first time. Watch closely, she said, and hush. But I felt them before I saw them, small warm sparks along my arms. Then there they were, fireflies lighting up and expanding in howls and swirls as they abandoned human flesh. Like snowflakes, Franny said, none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before." p. 155

"Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn't watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I'm afraid. A one-sided cajoling and coaching of the young, a one-way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never be signed." p. 246


"She no longer looked haunted, as she had in high school, but still, if you looked closely at her eyes you could see the skittery rabbit energy that often made people nervous. She had an expression of someone who was constantly on the lookout for something or someone that hadn't yet arrived. Her whole body seemed to slant forward in inquiry, and though she had been told at the bar where she worked that she had beautiful hair or beautiful hands.....people never said anything about her eyes." p. 249



"I realized how much I wished I could be where my mother was. His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose...." p. 280


"She's been great, he said, a rock. A spongelike rock, but a rock......and I watched as my parents kissed. They kept their eyes open as they did, and my mother was the one to cry first, the tears dropping down onto my father's cheeks until he wept too." p.282