Four

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

The first time I read The Lovely Bones, I was an eighth grader and probably too immature or too young to understand the meaning of the plot, characters, and narration. However, reading it as recently this past summer, it has hit close to home in the wake of recent events that have shaken my own community, leaving me to dwell on things such as life, death, and everything in between.

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is the novel's voice, the first sentence itself ("I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973") forshadows a story full of grief, sadness, and acceptance. The most unique aspect of the story is perhaps the fact that She narrates the events from heaven, watching on as her family and community try to make sense of her death and go on with their lives.

Taking a shortcut home from school through a cornfield, Susie is lured into a makeshift underground den, raped, and brutally murdered by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, man who has taken many lives before hers. Sebold makes it a point to mention that everyone has his or her own version of heaven, Susie's resembling a high school, a heaven of her "simplest dreams."

The book follows the lives of her immediate family after her death, their attempts to cope and find peace in a world without their daughter/sister/friend/etc. Susie's father immerses himself in work and is determined to find her killer, her mother sprials into depression, her younger brother learns to deal with the absence of a sister who was gone before he even really began living his life, and her younger sister breezes through adolescence, her first boyfriend, the rest of high school, doing the things that Susie never had the oppurtunity to do.

The "lovely bones" that surround Susie's death-- the developement of the relationships between her friends and family, the progression of the life of her murderer, the memories remembered and the new ones made, are truly what make this novel one of growth, redemption, and in a way, coming of age.