This book starts by ripping out the readers heart…with the promise of ending the book as enduringly as the starting was horrific (hope that makes sense.) It didn’t quite fulfill that promise. This is a story about a 14-year-old girl brutally raped and murdered and how her death impacts the people around her. I hoped (throughout the book) that all the lives damaged would be healed by the end of the story fulfilling the promised happy ending and was somewhat disappointed.
At the end of the story Susie, the victim’s father is a shadow of the man he was at the beginning of the story. Susie’s mother becomes a “distant island.” Susie’s brother Buckley is resentful towards his mother and basically a caregiver for his father. I think the two success stories in this book revolve around Susie’s sister Lindsay and her grandmother. Lindsay is an honor student throughout high school, she completes college, and gets engaged to her school sweetheart. Susie’s grandmother moves in with the family and helps keep the household running while the rest of the family tries to put the pieces together.
I did find the writing of the story a bit confusing at times. The author worded things (occasionally) that seemed sporadic, I found I had to reread several areas for clarity.
Overall I liked the book, but I liked the movie better. The movie focused more on the beauty of Susie’s life and less on the tragedy itself.
January 19, 2010 at 6:10 pm |
I would never have read Lovely Bones if it hadn’t been suggested. It is out of my usual array of picks. I liked the book so thank you whoever picked it out.
The subject was horrific. I was happy that the author didn’t choose to drag us through more details than necessary. This book seemed exploratory on the author’s part. I felt like she perhaps had a lot of questions. What happens to us after death. What happens to families in the face of catastrophic tragedy? Can there be a life after that?
I know most of you didn’t like that this book didn’t have a happy ending, but I think the author chose to tell you the truth. People don’t usually thrive after something like this. They don’t usually do more than survive such a happening. Maybe the author chose to show us that.
The title is the Lovely Bones. It is echoed at the end and explains to us what Alice Sebold is trying to say. “These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. …The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”
So what were the lovely bones? What grew up around this volcano sized loss?
Ruth: hmm I don’t know where Sebold was going with Ruth. She is this wierd extra character that Sebold only seems to use to explore sexuality and awareness of the living dead being here around us???
Ray Singh: Pretty simple character. He is the boy who lives with the “what if” girlfriend. The relationship that never came to fruition and usually we only wonder about when we are unhappy in our current relationship. The wierdest stunt in the book is Susie’s return to make love to Ray. Now, had she as an adolescent come back for that perfect kiss, and bestowed it on him while he was say – sleeping – I think I would understand where Sebold was going. It would have fulfilled Susie’s youthful desires. But to come back and make love to him??? The whole book seems to be about accepting loss and moving forward finally. What happens to poor Ray after Susie inhabits Ruth’s body, makes love to him and then leaves without explaining that she will never be back. Does he continue to look for her. Because a sexual experience like that certainly wouldn’t be considered closure???
Susie’s mother Ocean Eyes: She disentigrates and disengages from her family. She comes back and has a magical epiphany and realizes she never had stopped loving her husband. “How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it a secret from yourself?”It was too sudden and dramatic of a change. I think the author dropped something somewhere. The mother felt unfulfilled before tragedy struck her family. We didn’t see her grow while she was away. Sebold did however paint a realistic picture of the strain felt between family members when mama returns.
Susie’s father: He is focused on Susie. He remains unwavering both in his love for his child and his love for his wife. We like him. His growth is only to survive Susie’s death and continue to love and care for his family. His gift seems to be to continue to remember Susie as a seperate and whole person – not just the girl that died. And also, to be able to love each of his children instead of staying focused only on his child he lost. He is pretty static throughout the book.
Lindsey: changes in that she grows up. And she makes choices that help her grow up rather successfully. She will forever be marked by her sister’s death but she refuses to be defined as only “the dead girl’s sister”.
Buckley: Buckley is damaged goods. Even at the end of the book, the author tries to make nice by saying that he will work out his problems banging on the drums but this isn’t very convincing. He seems to have a permanent hole in his soul.
Grandma: You got’ta love grandma. Sebold uses her to make some of the books strongest statements. “I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.” This is something I loved. We need to recognize goodness in the oh-so-imperfect people around us.
Mr. Harvey: Sebold gives us enough details to understand that he was damaged goods.
Most interestingly, Sebold doesn’t allow Susie to guide the police or her father to find her killer. She doesn’t give Harvey a swift and vengeful death. Rather, I think she is telling us that things here on earth are allowed to run their course. The world will continue to have George Harveys. Our lives will continue to suffer because of other people we cannot count on anyone to save us. Even heaven is somewhere we go only when we are ready to move on. “If you stop asking why … you can be free”. “Let go of the dead, and the living – to learn to accept.” And she lets us know she thinks heaven isn’t perfect either. “I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven isn’t about safety just as it is not about gritty reality”.
The Lovely Bones. What grows up in our absence? How do we survive? Grandma in her infinite, inebriated wisdom says “she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.”
I liked the book.
January 19, 2010 at 10:14 pm |
Outstanding post!!! I loved how you discussed each character and how they grew or stayed the same throughout the book. I agree with your description of Susie’s father and his love for his children…but it saddens me that Sebold chose to leave him in such a devastated condition. He was the strong, grounded center of the family in the beginning of the book and a mere shadow figure in the end. Hmm…
I can see your point regarding why the author may have chosen an unhappy ending instead of the traditional happy one and you (as usual) are correct. That sort of tragic event would live on forever always hiding in the background…
February 2, 2010 at 5:00 pm |
Yes, Kelly, you have done a great job of capturing for me what I couldn’t put my finger on — why it had to have a sad ending. As you said, these things tear a family apart in ways we can’t imagine unless we’ve been there. As I told the group who met with me, my family was friends with another family who had very small children and when one fell out of the back of the pickup truck (and died), it was only a matter of time before the marriage dissolved. I always wondered how the rest of the children coped with the loss of their little brother and the dissolution of their parents’ marriage. I imagine a Buckley or two in there.
I think any one of us can think back to events in our lives and the lives of our friends and family for these kinds of tragedies. Not just death but crisis — batterers, alcoholics, child abusers, rapes… I see them all doing the same thing to us — killing a part of us that can never be fixed.
Thank you for making sense of this sad tale.
February 3, 2010 at 4:36 am |
I’m going to stick to my ending…where everyone lives happily ever after, because they realize that Susie is living in heaven very happily with God and she is patiently waiting for the rest of her happy family to join her, in their own time.
I have to go to bed now as the Tooth Fairy won’t pick up my lost tooth until after I go to sleep…she leaves me a dollar per tooth, you know.
(I wanted to add that I very much believe in God and if Susie was a real victim then yes I believe she would be living happily in heaven…the Tooth Fairy add-on was about the rest of the family living happily ever after. I’m sure they would suffer for a very long time for many reasons and for many “what-ifs?” It would be nice if we could accept that our loved ones are in better hands in heaven than they could ever be on earth and rejoice for them, that was my point.)
Goodnight and remember God is always with us.