The Lovely Bones

Spoiler Warning: If you have not read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, you may not wish to read this review. I tend to give away too much.

The Lovely Bones begins with the rape and murder of a fourteen year old girl by a deranged neighbor. The entire story is told from Susie's viewpoint, describing the horror of her murder and dismemberment, and then proceeding to describe her experience of heaven and her years of observing the toll her murder takes on her family and friends. So many lives are changed irrevocably by her death and particularly the gruesome manner of her death. Her body is never found, leaving it difficult for her parents to find any closure for their grief.

Susie's heaven is "a separate peace." She can have pretty much what she wants but she seems to be trapped in one part of heaven because she has not yet let go of her family and her earthly life. Her loved ones don't necessarily find their way to her the moment they pass, and she is not waiting for them with open arms at the end of a shining tunnel. They find their way to her, but some arrive sooner than others. And they don't always stay in her corner of heaven but sometimes return to their own versions of the afterlife. She finds that she can have the things she wishes for but that doesn't mean eternal happiness, just as things on earth cannot make happiness.

Somewhere at the beginning of the book Susie mentions lamp lights that resemble those in a stage set of "Our Town," a play that also deals with the relationship of the dead to the living. I remember seeing "Our Town" when I was around Susie's age and feeling Emily's frustration when she is allowed to return to Earth to relive her twelfth birthday, but no one really sees her, no one realizes that she is not a twelve year old but a grown woman who died young.

In Susie's case, she does get that magic moment. A girl she knew at school, Ruth, felt her touch as she hastily departed her body the night of the murder, and knew it was Susie's soul departing. She becomes obsessed with Susie and with death, and with the death of women and girls, the souls of whom she is able to see. Finally, after years of observing Ruth befriend Ray, the boy who gave Susie her first and only kiss, she is for some reason permitted to inhabit Ruth's body just long enough to make love to Ray. And Ray is able to perceive her and know that he is making love to his dead girlfriend Susie contained in Ruth's body. She succeeds where Emily failed, in making contact with a living loved one. Others see her also but this is her most tangible manifestation of all.

At the end, she realizes that her violent murder has influenced so many lives and that her family has turned out the way it has because of the "lovely bones" built by her death. There is transcendent joy in the ending: although they still think of each other the grief is over. Susie has moved on in her heaven, and her family has moved on to new beginnings; even a little niece is named after Susie.

This was an excellent read especially for someone who believes in an afterlife and has great curiousity about what the "dead" think and feel about us. We won't know for sure until we get there but I appreciated Susie's voice and her imagined thoughts and emotions. I recommend this book.