The Lovely Bones (Paperback)

• Category:  Books  »  Fiction & Literature  »  Fantasy - Contemporary
• Format: Paperback   Learn more about the Paperback format using Tower WIKI.
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Number of Pages: 368
• ISBN: 0316044938
• WAPI (Tower ID): 113427093
• Release Date: October 12, 2009
• Average Customer Review: There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review!
• Tower.com Sales Rank: #56411 in Books (See Top 100 Books Bestsellers)
• #6804 in Fiction & Literature (See Top 100 Fiction & Literature Bestsellers)
• #300 in Fantasy - Contemporary (See Top 100 Fantasy - Contemporary Bestsellers)

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"The book's conceit, that Susie lives watchfully on, is also the book's deceit. THE LOVELY BONES aims to be, in the end, a feel-good book about rape, torture and murder, and while such an unlikely achievement is remarkable, it is also unsettling in ways that Sebold does not begin to address....The idea of an epidemic of children being snatched by their neighbors amounts to a fantasy...: it's chilling, thrilling and completely unbuttressed by fact. THE LOVELY BONES endows that fantasy with a happy ending. Cuteness, it turns out, is immortal. This is not only untrue; it's distasteful. For all Sebold's deftness, her novel plays into US culture's saccharine sensibility about girls and violence, a sensibility that attends the appetite for horror and is inseparable from it."

"I asked myself, as I read THE LOVELY BONES, what could be the point of having the dead girl narrate the aftermath of her death--what, in other words, this voice could achieve that a standard omniscient narrator couldn't--and it occurred to me that the answer is that Susie is there to provide comfort: not to those who survive her, to whom she can't really make herself known or felt, but to the audience. The real point of Sebold's novel isn't to make you confront dreadful things, but, if anything, to assure you that they have no really permanent consequences....In its proleptic yearning for relief, and indeed in its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of victimhood, its pseudo-therapeutic lingo of healing and insistence that everything is really OK, that we needn't really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary, Sebold's book is indeed timely...."

"What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy...about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed...through love and acceptance....[Some] lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's achievements: the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family."

"An extraordinary, almost-successful debut that treats sensational material with literary grace....[M]ostly mesmerizing and deserving of the attention it's sure to receive."

Susie Salmon was raped and murdered in 1973, and, from her perch in heaven, she tells the story of what happened to her, watches her family back on earth as they go about their grief-stricken lives, and describes what it's like to be a kid in heaven. Alice Sebold's novel, which draws on some of her own experiences, became a runaway best-seller as soon as it was published. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

This deluxe trade paperback edition of Alice Sebold's modern classic features French flaps and rough-cut pages.
Once in a generation a novel comes along that taps a vein of universal human experience, resonating with readers of all ages. "The Lovely Bones" is such a book - a phenomenal #1 bestseller celebrated at once for its narrative artistry, its luminous clarity of emotion, and its astoniishing power to lay claim to the hearts of millions of readers around the world.
""My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.""
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on eath continue without her - her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling.
Out of unspeakable traged and loss, "The Lovely Bones" succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy
"A stunning achievement." -"The New Yorker"
"Deeply affecting. . . . A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time." -"New York Times"
"A triumphant novel. . . . It's a knockout." -"Time"
"Destined to become a classic in the vein of "To Kill a Mockingbird." . . . I loved it." -Anna Quindlen
"A novel that is painfully fine and accomplished." -"Los Angeles Times"
""The Lovely Bones" seems to be saying there are more important things in life on earth than retribution. Like forgiveness, like love." -"Chicago Tribune"

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