I started this book to fill the mental downtime between work sessions, and it overtook my world. I finished all 300+ pages in essentially three days. I was supposed to set up the brand new computer my brother made for me for Christmas this weekend as well as the iPod I got my husband; do all kinds of 2006 financial paper processing; get tax paperwork ready. Guess what – none of it got done because this book was such a page turner. I actually don’t recommend it if you have something pressing to get done, b/c you may find it difficult given the pull of this book. :-)

I wanted to know what happened to the protagonist, Susie after her death, if she would ever be free of her earthly burdens, what became of her killer, how her family would ultimately take it, what her friend Ruth would see, whether her high school love Ray would get over her, whether her mother could get over herself enough to put the family first again, whether the investigator Len would ever get off his ass and catch the killer… I wanted to know what lessons Sebold was telling us.

wait for the movie. it’s in production.

i enjoyed this book to an extent. i did like the idea of susie’s heaven and how she perceived it, and all of that stuff. but i do agree with some comments prior to me that after about halfway through the book, you realize that there is nothing left for the narrator to tell… it’s all filler.

WARNING: Some spoilers in this “review,” if you can even call it a review, ha.

I just finished this book. It was really good, pretty easy to read, but hard to follow at times. She jumps around a lot in the story it felt like.

Though I thought it was kind of weird when she uses her friends body to come back to earth and “hooks up” with her friend Ray. It wasn’t very believable, and just didn’t seem to fit in, or it was irrelevant.

I didn’t feel enough justice in the end either. People told me it was a satisfying read, but not enough for me. I was hoping that the family would have more closure than that. I wanted Susie to guide someone to the sinkhole!

Well, overall, it was a good read. All 507 pages of my Large Type copy, haha. It was the only one they had available at the library. Definitely something to read at least once.

Rot. I picked this up wanting some easy to read whilst travelling, prompted mostly by my recognition of the author’s name due to her having spoken to a 20th Century Women’s Writing class I took a couple of years back. I couldn’t remember anything she spoke to us about, but surely if she was hauled in to talk to us she must have some merit, I figured. Er… nup. I was after something easy to read, as I mentioned, but, whilst certainly easy to read in terms of its prose style, this was hellish to get through. I complained about how bad it was to the person beside me in the bus through all the second half; she commented to me on a rest stop, as I sat reading furiously, that it looked like I had changed my view of it and was interested, but I just wanted to get the hell through it so I could dump it in the bookshelf of the next backpacker hostel I was staying in and stop having to carry the thing around.

So, really, not recommended.

That said, the premise didn’t interest me at all, even as I bought the book. Maybe if it does you, reading further might be more worthwhile for you than it was for me. I was expecting the writing style or the thought the story inspired to draw my interest into what seemed like a rather mediocre premise, but neither prose nor the ideas communicated through it had any substance. All the way through to the end, I waited. Nothing. Cold, uninteresting and ultimately unbelievable implied author who inspired no feelings in me for either her or her family (whose response to her death are what the book’s primarily about), and a less important parallel storyline having to do with the solution of her murder that you only want to be tied up in the end because it means a nice neat (too neat) closure for everyone and, hence, the end of the book.

Too, did anyone else familiar with the work of singer Dar Williams feel any suspicion that Sebold’s been listening to the song ‘Alleluia’ when she has her narrator in a heaven that includes a school cafeteria? That such a mediocre piece of work should have proceeded from an idea to which the author can’t even lay a claim of originality made the book grate even more on me.

In short: don’t bother.

After I read this book, I resolved never ever to read anything by Alice Sebold again.

This is a really terribly written novel. The concept is interesting, the main character is almost someone I could identify with, but the way it’s written is like cotton candy; it’s fluff, there’s no substance to the story and it seems sweet at the time but leaves a really awful aftertaste. There are very few books I have felt like I wasted my time reading, and some of my friends highly recommended I read The Lovely Bones, but it comes across something like a Readers Digest story expanded for YA publication; this would be fine, of course, if it didn’t try to pawn itself off as mature literature.

Really, read something by Yeats instead.

The Lovely Bones is about a girl named Susie who is brutally raped and murdered when she is fourteen. Susie goes to her own individual heaven and she can see everything happening on earth. She can see her family greiving their loss and she can see her killer, a neighbor no one but her father is willing to suspect.

Susie watches her classmates and younger brother and sister grow up while she remains the same fourteen year old girl. She is fixated on Earth below instead of trying to focus on her new life in heaven.

What I found amazing was Susie’s calm and general lack of emotion throughout the events of the the book. She is killed in a disturbing manner and Susie casually speaks of it as if she were describing someone making a peanut butter sandwich. She is far too comfortable with her own death and murder for my liking.

It was certainly a unique book and a very good read, but the last hundred pages or so seemed very sluggish to me. It was almost as if the writer were told she needed to make the book longer, so she tacked on the pages. Thankfully it came together nicely in the last couple of chapters.

”My neighbors and teachers, friends and family, circled an arbitrary spot no far from where I’d been killed. My father, sister and brother heard the singing again once they were outside. Everything in my father leaned and pitched toward the warmth and light. h wanted so badly to hae me remembered in teh mind and hearts of everyone. I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me.” (Page 209)

Susie Salmon is 14 years old when she’s murdered by a neighbourhood pedophile. From her own version of heaven, she watches over her home and family. Her siblings and friends grow up, her killer goes on to kill again and Susie witnesses it all, narrating with love and a gentle humour about the life she left behind.

This is a fascinating and absorbing book. The opening scene of Susie’s rape and murder is disturbing, but it’s not too overwhelming because the story is told calmy and factually, in short segments, by Susie herself. It sets the scene and emotional context for the rest of the book.

The story flows well. The characters are complex. In fact, sometimes they didn’t seem believable (in particular, Susie’s mother seems odd and I wish the author had spent more time exploring her particular perspective).

It’s bittersweet, watching Susie watch life go on without her. And ‘heaven’ is a fascinating place. It’s a good read.

I found it disturbing and difficult to read – not specifically because of the scene in the beginning. It also did tend to seem unrealistic so i could not get into it.

I worked at the library when this book became really popular. I tend to avoid such books, as they are often mushy love stories, or randomly popular books because “Oprah says it’s good.” But I got my hands on a copy and it was intense! An original concept…I really enjoyed it :)

I read this about this same time last year. So good I had to give it another read. This one stays in my permanent collection.

I read this book during a difficult time in my life. I had just lost someone that I loved very dearly and this was a tremendous help. I love it.

9.2002
10/10 Stars

Interesting…

it’s difficult to read, especially the fourteen year old main character’s rape and murder scene that begins the novel, but it is very much worth it. I was sucked into it from the very beginning, couldn’t put it down. creepy, and horrifying, and it made me quite paranoid for a while, but it was stunningly beautiful and so well written.

it was an interesting choice for Sebold to begin the book with such a vivid description of her murder – otherwise, the reader would be slightly preoccupied with the questions of what exactly happened. some human thing in us makes us want to know the gorey details, I believe. so after she got that out of the way, she could move on to the “real” story of how the girl’s family recovers and goes on with their lives. also amazing are the descriptions of the girl in heaven, looking down, watching her family.