The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

RATING: FOUR STARS 

When I first picked up The Lovely Bones, I didn't know what to expect. I’d heard that the film was good and had been advised by more than a few friends to watch it, if it ever happened to be on TV. But I'm not one for watching a book-based film without reading the actual novel first, and so (with a long train journey imminent), I decided to give Alice’s Sebold’s story a go. 

Fortunately, and despite my misgivings about a plot that I wouldn't normally gravitate to, I really enjoyed reading The Lovely Bones and found its pages to be full of emotion and tear-jerking prose as Sebold tells the heartbreaking story of Susie Salmon, a young girl who was abducted and murdered by a paedophile while walking home from school one day. 

The story itself is told through the misunderstanding and innocent eyes of a child, describing how Susie sees Earth while looking down from her Heaven. As she watches her family and the police searching for her killer, Susie has to learn to cope not only with her own death, but also with the devastation that her loss has caused on Earth – destroying the lives of her family as they struggle to come to terms with her absence and what it means for them. 

Understandably then, The Lovely Bones is full of heartbreak and makes for a captivating read that I found very difficult to put down. Due to this, I praise the book most highly and say, should you read it, that you won’t be the same person when you turn the last page as you were when you opened the first.