The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $0.50 You Save: $14.49 (97%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Lovely Bones
Book Review: An enrichning story about life and the life after death
Summary: 5 Stars
The Lovely Bones is an enlightening tale about a girl name Susie who on a walk home from school became the victim of rape and murder. She watches her family grow up and apart and then later they come to live their lives again.
As far as the book goes, there is no real central plot. Some might say this is a very bad thing, but I ask you: what is plot? How many of us actually read for plot? Are we reading a book for plot or story? The answer my friends is story. And the Lovely Bones has a very enrichning storyline full of characters that will make you angry, and others that will make you smile.
At first the story comes off as pretty blatant. What's it all about? What's the point of Susie watching the family. But as the tale goes on it becomes clearer that this is not a story about finding Susie's murderer, but a story about where the home and the heart is. A story about a grieving family that has to struggle through their own emotions to really become a family. And Susie watches it all. The collapse and reconstruction of her family over the years.
Remarkably written, The Lovely Bones prose float off the page as literacy wonders, and soon become memorable lines in the reader's hearts.
The story is a drama, full of emotion and a little bit of hope. Alice Seabold does add a touch of humor to the story as well. The story begins so horribly but then when you get to the end you realize just how uplifting the book really is.
The Lovely Bones is a wonderful tale that accurately portrays the realities of death and grieving, as well as compassion and togetherness. Now quite in the league of To Kill a Mockingbird, but certainly a joyful read nonetheless.
Book Review: An excellent book
Summary: 4 Stars
I read this book in a manner of a week. You must understand, however, that with work and many other commitments, this is a short time to spend on a book for me. I thought that this book was an excellently written rendition of a horrible tragedy. The storyline carries you through Susie's death to her first kiss, and to the resolution of the investigation into her death. Such a sensitive topic...and yet it was handled beautifully by Ms. Sebold. It neither minimized nor overblew the tragedy of death and loss, but told a moving story and kept me reading it, waiting expectantly for the next page.Book Review: An excessively grusome story of family loss
Summary: 3 Stars
With over 2500 reviews already, it is hard to add something meaningful to the evaluation of this book but hopefully some people will find the following useful.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is a difficult book to read with any enjoyment. The thing that mars the book for me is the way in which the young girl who narrates the story from heaven, Susie Salmon, is killed. She is brutally raped and murdered and then her body is dismembered by a sadistic neighbor who is not immediately apprehended and who consequently haunts the book with his presence. In my view it was not necessary to the basic theme of the book--dealing with loss--for Susie to die in this fashion. A more ordinary death--accident, illness--would have served the author's purpose just as well. Thus it seems an unnecssary bit of sick sensatonalism to have her die in such a gruesome manner.
As I started to read the various responses of the family to Susie's death I was reminded of the opening lines of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Clearly the Salmon family has a right to be unhappy., but one wonders about the impact the death has on them, particularly, Jack the father. The death of one's child is perhaps the greatest sorrow one has to face in life, yet Jack Salmon had two other children and should have remained strong for their sake. In a family that is fundamentally happy and strong, such would have been the case. Thus the way the family comes apart is indicative of a fundamental flaw in its makeup. The one member who comes across as the strongest is a bit of an outsider--Grandma Lynn.
The strength of the book is in the matter-of-fact teen age tone that Sebold is able to give to Susie. She is able to comment on the events that occur on earth with that still-innocent manner of a young girl who despite experiencing the ultimate tragedy and despite being unable to impact what happens to the living remains optimistic. It is the response of Susie's friends and peers that comes across as most appropriate and realistic, while that of the family seems more stereotypical.
The comments on the back cover (from Time magazine's review of the book) may best describe the book: It is, above all, a novel which finds light in the darkest of places, and shows how even when that light seems to be utterly extinguished, it is still there, waiting to be rekindled." If you can see the book from this perspective it can have meaning for you.
Book Review: An honest, well told story about despair and recovery
Summary: 4 Stars
It would be hard to overstate the horror of the first chapter of this book, a stark and unflinching first person account of the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl.
The only element that keeps it readable (and even then, barely) is that it's narrated from heaven by the remarkably unbitter and charming victim, Susie.
It's an odd premise, and there are points where the structure seems like it's been put in place only to provide the reader some escape from the really tough realities of the story. This is not to say that the story - primarily of the family's recovery - does not come through. It does, and in strikingly honest form. There is anger, sadness isolation and fear; and there is the clear imprint of the absense of Susie.
Overall, Sebold has told a really difficult story in the disguise of a really readable novel. She's done so in a structure that provides enough glimmers of hope to keep both her readers and her characters from giving up in the face of tragedy, weaving in an inventive, if imperfect afterlife coming of age story.
Book Review: An interesting idea
Summary: 4 Stars
It's difficult to classify The Lovely Bones as a mystery. On the first page, the reader discovers that the narrator is dead, has been murdered, and by whom. I suppose the mystery is in watching the family of Susie, the victim, find out what we the reader already know.
Rather, this is a human interest story. Sebold delves into the ways that a family and community deals with tragedy. Some never move on, some forget easily. Some see the dead in the living. Some go on a quest to solve the mysteries of other dead young women. Some families break under the strain.
Certainly the story is a tragic one; in an age of Amber alerts and where images of missing young women flood our news shows, The Lovely Bones is a timely story. These true life stories parallel this fictional one in many ways; the communities have pulled together, people with no connection to the deceased feel one after her death, etc.
A touching novel, The Lovely Bones will make you feel for the characters. You will celebrate in their triumphs and recoil in their miseries.