Book Review: The Lovely Bones

Found for free in the basement bookcase of a neighbor (residents put their unwanted books down there.) Another one of the 100 books the BBC says I should read before I die. Coming almost right after The Five People You Meet in Heaven, this provided a more palatable version of the afterlife for me than the previous Hallmark Card version written by Mitch Albom. Alice Sebold's best-seller imagines a 14-year-old girl looking down on her family, friends and her murderer after she is raped and killed. There's less sugary sentimentality here, plus the Pennsylvania locale is familiar to me having grown up in Norristown (though I can't remember any cornfields.) The format is that of a police thriller, but it's more about our relationship with the dead and how they live inside us as long as we remember them. That's Sebold's metaphor for heaven. The murdered girl lives in an idealized version of her hometown and the high school she never got to attend. She watches her family on Earth as they adjust (or fail to adjust) to her absence. Their complex stories form the backbone if you will and the metaphysical speculation is thankfully kept to a minimum. The police thriller aspect, is not stereotypical with a false Hollywood TV ending. With all its spiritualism and visits from the dead, The Lonely Bones is more realistic than The Five People You Meet in Heaven. The subsidiary characters are as finely drawn as the dead girl and her family, especially the alcoholic, but supportive grandmother. I liked the neighbor mother, Mrs. Singh, and her Dunhill cigarettes.