The Lovely Bones

Synopsis: My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from 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."The Lovely Bones" is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. 'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose ..."The Lovely Bones" is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing' - "The Times". 'Moving and compelling ...It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you. I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed' - Maggie O'Farrell, "Sunday Telegraph".

Review: I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with this book, at times I was compelled and intrigued by it at others I found it depressing and far fetched. I suppose the subject matter makes it quite a difficult book to actually enjoy but I didn't really wholly believe in Susie's heaven, I could never fix it properly in my mind and it all seemed a little cobbled together. Things about the book annoyed me, some things positively enraged me ... bits where it seemed the author had one eye on the screenplay rather than the novel ..


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in particular the scene on the first anniversary of Susie's death when the neighbour's drift over one by one to the cornfield and then sing hymns by candlelight .. all entirely unplanned of course .. and are overheard by the family. I've seen that scene .. or one like it played out a thousand times in TV movies.

But there was still a lot that I did like about the book. It was interesting to view the surviving members of the family and how they dealt with their grief, mostly badly and that's probably fairly true to life. I liked eccentric old Grandma Lynn and thought the writer depicted both the evil, creepy, perverse Mr Harvey and Susie's heartbroken, grief-stricken, father, wonderfully well. Strangely, I didn't find my tears jerked at all, apart from perhaps the opening chapter which was quite affecting, I don't know if I connected to Susie enough on an emotional level. I positively hated the scene ..


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where Susie swaps places with Ruth and enters her corporeal body in order to experience sex with Ray Singh, an old flame. Ray's acceptance of the change I just found bizarre and unconvincing let alone the fact that Susie was only fourteen when she was murdered. I know it's fiction but it stretched credibility too far for me.

Mixed reactions but I'm glad I read it. Despite the problems I had with it I still thought it was a page turner.