The Lovely Bones

Starting off this year in a lockdown, it made sense to me to start the year off right with a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Leant to me by my fellow bookworm bestie before she moved, it’s been sat on my shelf for 2 years, waiting to be read! To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.

The book started off fantastically well and within the first 3 pages I was gripped. It’s no secret to anyone who reads the blurb of the book that Susie Salmon (the protagonist and narrator) dies early on in the story and is watching her family move through their grief and lives after her death.

The first 200 or so pages were so gripping that I struggled to put the book down and actually lost sleep over it, I wanted to know what was going to happen next. This is despite the overuse of bracketing commas, with snippets of information that didn't necessarily need to be there, that meant I had to go back and re-read paragraphs and pages. I felt that, in the first two thirds of the book, the ‘story’ was well told and it had some momentum to it.

When we get to the last third of the book, without giving anything away, there’s a really gripping chapter that had my heart racing, hoping nothing bad would happen to Susie’s sister, Lindsey. The book then took a massive turn and I actually didn't want to bother finishing it. The momentum of the storyline seemed to drop off. Instead, it became just a description of how the lives of the living go on as they get older and go off to college, get engaged and move on with lives in their own ways.

It’s also at this point (which came as a bit of a surprise), that Susie’s mum suddenly changes her attitude towards her family. I understand that this is to show the way that grief affects people in different ways. However, for me, it came across as very sudden - a poor attempt at creating more dimension to the character when, actually, it had the opposite effect. It’s not just Susie’s mother who seems to have no depth though, there’s not much to any of the characters, not even Mr Harvey, Susie’s murdered.

The problem with Sebold’s ‘number one bestseller’ is that, as opposed to this being a story, it’s actually a 328-page situation. Following Susie's death, the characters age but don’t have any wants. Nothing drives the story forward, Sebold simply writes about a family's life after their daughter's death

I cannot even begin to tell you how frustrating the end of the book was. Just thinking about it boils my blood. And it’s not just a personal preference, the last 4 chapters of the book are just completely non-sensical. Why would someone have a chance at coming back down to earth and not use that opportunity to help the people she loves most find her body so that they can get their closure, which is the obvious reason that her mother and father are (though poorly written) fucked up by her death. Instead, she decides to spend her time having sex with the only guy to give her a second look whilst she was still alive. It makes it seem as though she got bored writing and just wanted to get to the end before ever getting to the story.

All in all, the idea of the book was fantastic and, had it been written more comprehensively with a better ending, I could understand how this book has become so popular and been made into a Hollywood movie (which I’m shocked to find is worse than the book). However, because of the poor sentence structures, misuse of grammar and lack of any kind of plot line to drive the book, I would not recommend anyone bother wasting their time reading this.