The Lovely Bones

I read this book years ago, but it stuck with me.

The idea that when a loved one dies they watch over us, wishing to end our pain, is a powerful one. And for a novelist it’s a rich seam to mine. And yet The Lovely Bones did it so well, that few have tried to follow where it leads.

Although it moves in a very different direction, my own book clearly owes a debt of inspiration to Alice Seebold and I couldn’t not make it first on my list.

Contemporary suspense, psychological fiction, the afterlife, family dynamics, and heaps of disturbing are the ingredients mixed together in The Lovely Bones. Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was raped and murdered. Only none of the living know who did it. But Susie knows. Her soul is stuck in the “Inbetween,” where she can watch the Earth below. She sees her family grieve. Sees her murderer, Mr. Harvey, who lives in her neighborhood near her school. Will he get caught? Or will Susie’s sister or another young girl be his next victim? As a ghostly “watcher” from the Inbetween, Susie narrates this compelling… show more.

I love books that revolve around the desperate emotions of life, of the very decisions we make over living or dying, and how one cherishes or fritters away the short time we have on Earth. The Lovely Bones focuses on family, but in this case, it’s the disappearance of a child. Emotionally driven and captivating, Alice Sebold’s deft writing style enveloped me in the time and place she created—an art I have done my best to apply to my own stories. 

The Lovely Bones was my inaugural afterlife book and it hooked me. This story differs a bit from the others. Even though it has a teen protagonist, it is an adult novel about the murder of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon. As we dig into her story, she’s adjusting to her new home in the afterlife, a place that is not what she expected. While exploring, Susie watches her family, friends and even her killer continue living. Despite the darkness and suspense in this tale, it is also full of hope, humor, and even joy.

“When the dead are done with… show more.

This is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever read. The author takes a horrendous subject—the brutal murder of teenage Suzie Salmon (based on a real murder) and recounts it in such a way that it becomes a tender story. It takes place from 1973 to 1981 in a small town near Philadelphia. The only fantasy element is that the story is narrated by the victim. She can see her parents and siblings and knows their thoughts and feelings as they search for her killer and struggle to find meaning in their lives after her death. She also… show more.

I was into Stephen King when I was in my late teens and early twenties, but then I read Pet Sematary and swore off scary and/or paranormal books for good. I normally gravitate to quiet, tender, character-driven stories with a bit of “quirk” and this is the kind of thing I generally write, too. But once I started The Lovely Bones, I couldn’t pull myself out. The underground fort where fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is lured to be raped and murdered is the last kind of scene I ever want to enter in a book. But Alice Sebold is such… show more.

This story tapped into my emotions and gave me all the feels of dread, despair, frustration, and fear the storyline of a child going missing could bring. It’s a storyline that would be every parent’s nightmare. The way the writer connects the emotions for me made me live the raw pivotal moments during the search for a child and the raw feelings I'd imagine someone with a missing child would feel. As a writer, it helped me understand that language used is all-important when setting a scene, and to think more as a writer about how the reader feels when… show more.

Our culture is too emotionally immune to murdered women and girls, our television programming saturated with young, female victims. While we become obsessed with finding their killers, we are rarely asked to empathize with the dead. But right from the first line of Sebold's book, the dead—in this case, Susie Salmon—have complete agency. Susie immediately tells us that she looks like all the other missing girls from that era, but also that she hated home ec, and wanted to be "thought of as literary." We watch her suffer the search for her killer, and follow her friends and family in… show more.