The Lovely Bones

Literary fiction

First published: 2003
Print length: 328 pagesBack Bay Books, 2009

Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, 2002

Description

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon narrates from her personal heaven after she is raped and murdered while taking a shortcut through a Pennsylvania cornfield in 1973. Unable to intervene, she watches her family struggle with grief, denial, and the failure of the police investigation. Her father and sister gradually focus their suspicions close to home, while Susie’s classmates Ruth and Ray form an unexpected friendship through their shared connection to her. Moving between the dead girl’s expanding awareness and the lives continuing without her, the novel treats murder less as a puzzle than as a rupture spreading through a family and community. Its supernatural perspective joins a coming-of-age story to an intimate examination of loss, memory, and survival.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Direct · Lyrical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Intimate · Melancholic · Reflective · Unsettling

Structure

Linear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FamilyGriefMemoryMortalitySurvivalTrauma

About Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold is an American writer whose memoir and two novels examine violence through its long aftermath. Lucky recounts her rape as a university student and follows the experience’s continuing effects, using direct, spare narration to treat survival as an ongoing condition. The memoir is also inseparable from Sebold’s wrongful identification of Anthony Broadwater, who spent sixteen years in prison. In The Lovely Bones, she turns to lyrical, atmospheric fiction, giving a murdered girl an afterlife from which to observe her family’s grief and the failed investigation. The Almost Moon continues her attention to violent acts. Across these works, Sebold combines intimate testimony, close attention to damaged relationships, and an interest in how trauma reshapes ordinary life.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Back Bay Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780316044936

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