The Lovely Bones - Book

About a month ago, I read the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Here is the blurb:
This is Susie Salmon, speaking from heaven - which looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets, counsellors to help newcomers adjust, and friends to room with. Everything Susie wants appears as soon as she thinks of it - except the one thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved on earth.

Watching from her place in heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet...

I found that it is a very good book. The emotions are depicted in a way that is almost poetic and I'm sure many people who have read the book and have had to cope with loss have been able to identify with it. Don't be put off by the first chapter, which is a bit gruesome, because it becomes unputdownable.

Unfortunately I found that although the first half is brilliant, in the second half it seemed to run out of steam, and quite late in the book an event occurs that I thought was a bit naff and made it less believable.

The book is a number one bestseller and has been made into a film directed by Peter Jackson, who directed Lord of the Rings. I have not seen the film, but heard that the reviews were not that good.

I do recommend this book - the idea is excellent and the reviews are too. It is quite gritty, but powerful. (If you like gritty stories, you should watch/read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I haven't read the book, but I have the seen the film, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio. It is about the breakdown of a marriage and is very powerful indeed. Or if you love less gritty and more sad films, you should watch The Notebook or The Time Traveller's Wife, both starring Rachel McAdams, who was Regena in Mean Girls.)

Here are some of the reviews from the book cover of The Lovely Bones:
The Times: 'Compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing'
Daily Mail: 'That rare thing, a debut novel that takes the stuff of terrible tragedy and manages to transform it into something hopeful and redemptive...Alice Sebold's words are strung together like the most delicate of charm bracelets. This book will stay with you long after you finish the last page.'