Page Eight

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Finally! At long last! I feel like I am one of the last people to read this book (it's popular with the high school girls). The book is a bit difficult in the first few chapters. It begins with the rape and murder of 14-year old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") and the book is about her watching her family and friends from her quasi-heaven. The book explores loss and the devestation of the loss of a child on a family, but it also explores Sebold's ideas of heaven and the afterlife.

I think the book is intended more for a younger adult audience, even with its subject matter, and I say that because I've also read Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies, which also deals with the rape and murder of a young girl (based loosely on the Steven Truscott case) and that book was so difficult for me to get through I had to keep putting it down and almost feared picking it back up to keep reading.