Saturday, January 6, 2018

Book Review: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold


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Title: The Lovely Bones
Author: Alice Sebold
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery

Pages: 328
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Year Published: 2006
Format: Audiobook (Own Physical Copy)

"The Lovely Bones is the story of a family devastated by a gruesome murder-- a murder recounted by the teenage victim. Upsetting, you say? Remarkably, first- time novelist Alice Sebold takes this difficult material and delivers a compelling and accomplished exploration of a fractured family's need for peace and closure.

The details of the crime are laid out in the first few pages: from her vantage point in heaven, Susie Salmon describes how she was confronted by the murderer one December afternoon on her way home from school. Lured into an underground hiding place, she was raped and killed. But what the reader knows, her family does not. Anxiously, we keep vigil with Susie, aching for her grieving family, desperate for the killer to be found and punished.

Sebold creates a heaven that's calm and comforting, a place whose residents can have whatever they enjoyed when they were alive-- and then some. But Susie isn't ready to release her hold on life just yet, and she intensely watches her family and friends as they struggle to cope with a reality in which she is no longer a part. To her great credit, Sebold has shaped one of the most loving and sympathetic fathers in contemporary literature.

My Rating: 3.75/5

So I'm starting off this year with a lot of adult books that I'm reading. This book has been a long time coming, firstly because I've been listening to it on and off for about 2 and a half months. Why so long? Because it was my filler audiobook between books I was waiting for on Overdrive. So it took me a while to read this book, but it wasn't quite my favourite book. I really enjoyed the first half of this book where it deals with the families grief in the presence of the tragedy, but as time went on I just felt that the book was getting too drawn out. I was excited to see how the family changed over the years. Overall it was a good audiobook just not as great as I hoped that it would be.

Thanks for reading,
Sidny

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