“Oh, the book was so much better than the movie.” 9 times out of 10, books are always better than the movies they are turned into. However, I’ve just watched the trailer for The Lovely Bones, and I think the movie may do the book some justice. With major players like Matt Damon and Cameron Diaz, silver screen magic may hit its mark.
That being said, for being a first novel from Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones is a bonafide must read. The stories within the story are powerful, the language is mature and delivered with a gentle touch, and the characters, like the reader, are forever changed.
The novel is about the tragic death of a fourteen-year-old girl named Susie Salmon- like the fish. Her violent end comes relatively early so the novel continues to follow the paths of those left behind. Susie narrates from heaven, a wonderfully different place than you’d expect, “shiny like the promises in magazines…. We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams.” I love the notion that each person’s heaven is custom made, and that Susie’s surroundings are of her own making.
She fills the reader in on her family as they were before, and how they are affected after her death. She recalls in awful, beautiful detail her memories of her and her father’s hobby of making ships in bottles. It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the book (both before and after her death), and I have high expectations for an equivalent scene in the movie.
The most surprising part of the story is that, though everything stems from the girl’s death, the story is in actuality about the people left on Earth. It is about a family struggling to keep themselves together and sane in the wake of loss. They are disarmingly realistic in their flaws, groping for any sense of normalcy, something they know they will never find.
Individually, the family deals with their loss in dramatically different ways. Susie’s mother, drifting away long before her child is killed, runs away from her family and responsibilities and goes to California. She is my favorite scarred and broken character of any book that I’ve read in a long, long time because she is so alarmingly real.
Susie’s father is left to take care of the family- a sister, brother, and mother-in-law, all the while feeling in his heart that he knows who killed his daughter, with the realization that “a father’s suspicion is as powerful as a mother’s intuition.”
Buckley, the little brother, has the most to learn from his sister’s death, namely that when “you were treated special, later, something horrible would be told to you.”
Some of the most important revelations in the novel are in regard to the family dynamic- that mothers aren’t the only ones who grieve, fathers aren’t the only ones who abandon their families, and children can indeed be saviors.
There are shortfalls in the novel, though, as well. Susie’s friend Ruth is fleshed out well, but seems to be there to serve quite specific purposes, like when she trades bodies with Susie so Susie can have a brief love affair with the only boy she ever kissed. That whole scenario was borderline preposterous, yet Sebold’s soft-spoken language glossed over the awkward logistics and kept the wrinkle in time somewhat dreamy and sweet. The same is true with the way the killer is dealt with at the end. His departure is swift and not very well thought out, just kind of stuck in there to tidy up the story. The story itself drags on a bit too long for my taste, but still left me with goosebumps (the good kind) after reading the last lines.
As for the sweetheart of the story, Susie teaches us that rather than seeking the future, we should focus on the present- something she learns from her mother, saying, “If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put on my socks.”
Isn’t She Lovely?
“Oh, the book was so much better than the movie.” 9 times out of 10, books are always better than the movies they are turned into. However, I’ve just watched the trailer for The Lovely Bones, and I think the movie may do the book some justice. With major players like Matt Damon and Cameron Diaz, silver screen magic may hit its mark.
That being said, for being a first novel from Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones is a bonafide must read. The stories within the story are powerful, the language is mature and delivered with a gentle touch, and the characters, like the reader, are forever changed.
The novel is about the tragic death of a fourteen-year-old girl named Susie Salmon- like the fish. Her violent end comes relatively early so the novel continues to follow the paths of those left behind. Susie narrates from heaven, a wonderfully different place than you’d expect, “shiny like the promises in magazines…. We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams.” I love the notion that each person’s heaven is custom made, and that Susie’s surroundings are of her own making.
She fills the reader in on her family as they were before, and how they are affected after her death. She recalls in awful, beautiful detail her memories of her and her father’s hobby of making ships in bottles. It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the book (both before and after her death), and I have high expectations for an equivalent scene in the movie.
The most surprising part of the story is that, though everything stems from the girl’s death, the story is in actuality about the people left on Earth. It is about a family struggling to keep themselves together and sane in the wake of loss. They are disarmingly realistic in their flaws, groping for any sense of normalcy, something they know they will never find.
Individually, the family deals with their loss in dramatically different ways. Susie’s mother, drifting away long before her child is killed, runs away from her family and responsibilities and goes to California. She is my favorite scarred and broken character of any book that I’ve read in a long, long time because she is so alarmingly real.
Susie’s father is left to take care of the family- a sister, brother, and mother-in-law, all the while feeling in his heart that he knows who killed his daughter, with the realization that “a father’s suspicion is as powerful as a mother’s intuition.”
Buckley, the little brother, has the most to learn from his sister’s death, namely that when “you were treated special, later, something horrible would be told to you.”
Some of the most important revelations in the novel are in regard to the family dynamic- that mothers aren’t the only ones who grieve, fathers aren’t the only ones who abandon their families, and children can indeed be saviors.
There are shortfalls in the novel, though, as well. Susie’s friend Ruth is fleshed out well, but seems to be there to serve quite specific purposes, like when she trades bodies with Susie so Susie can have a brief love affair with the only boy she ever kissed. That whole scenario was borderline preposterous, yet Sebold’s soft-spoken language glossed over the awkward logistics and kept the wrinkle in time somewhat dreamy and sweet. The same is true with the way the killer is dealt with at the end. His departure is swift and not very well thought out, just kind of stuck in there to tidy up the story. The story itself drags on a bit too long for my taste, but still left me with goosebumps (the good kind) after reading the last lines.
As for the sweetheart of the story, Susie teaches us that rather than seeking the future, we should focus on the present- something she learns from her mother, saying, “If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put on my socks.”