“My mother began to cry, and my father held her, wiped her tears with the pads of his thumbs as they crested her cheekbones (Sebold).” Abigail and Jack are mourning the death of the oldest daughter Susie. Sebold’s The Lovely Bones has captured the hearts of a grieving family trying to move on from such tragedy.
The Lovely Bones is a story of love, lust, friendship and family. Susie Salmon, the main character is a fourteen year old girl who was raped and murdered by a neighbor. She starts the book off telling the fine points of what happened to her. “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6th, 1973. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail (Sebold 5).” Also Jack Salmon Susie’s dad was a very determined man to catch the killer of Susie. As a result it will lead him to the hospital. Lindsey Salmon middle child is crying silently over Susie’s death until her suspicions of who murdered Susie brings rage. Abigail Salmon mother who is growing distant from the family, but closer to someone else. The death of Susie has brought a new found friendship between Ruth Connors and Ray Singh.
Heaven is a place where all your simplest dreams come to one place. “When I first entered heaven I thought everyone saw what I saw. I realized that javelin-throwers & the shot putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven (Sebold 7).” Susie’s heaven was a place where you should be happy and comfortable. Along the course of the book Susie comes to realize that the things she wants most in her heaven (family), she have to let go of what is happening on Earth.

Experiencing tragedy will only make you stronger. Alice Sebold was attending Syracuse University when she “was jumped from behind, punched, and dragged at knifepoint into a tunnel entrance to an amphitheater. The man forced her to strip in the cold darkness, then raped her (Mehegan).” Not wanting to talk to anyone she secluded herself from friends and family. Sebold wanted to talk, but she couldn’t get what has happened to her. After a few years she finally decided to write about it. To have someone always watching you from another place is really interesting. Alice Sebold was intrigued about the “idea of a shadow that travels with you that has another destiny than you might have imagined (Mehegan).” I adore how Alice connects what happened in her life to Susie. It was very hard for Alice to talk about what happed to her. Susie has been longing to help her family catch the killer, but she can’t.
Spectacular, I would call The Lovely Bones which I will highly recommend because Sebold’s way of connecting life and death together is amazing and shows how each family member copes with death.