The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Bibliographic Information
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication year: 2002
ISBN: 978-0316166683

Reader’s Annotation
Murdered by her neighbor at age fourteen, Susie watches from her own personal heaven as her family grieves her loss. Even though she has passed on, Susie does her best to send clues about her murderer to any living person who will listen.

Plot Summary
Susie Salmon is a carefree fourteen-year-old growing up in 1973 Pennsylvania with her loving and supportive parents, younger brother, and older sister. She loves to take pictures and dreams of being a nature photographer. One night George Harvey, a single adult male who lives in her neighborhood, lures Susie into an underground shelter he has constructed under the guise of wanting to show her a clubhouse where she and her friends can play. In the shelter he rapes and murders Susie, then disposes of her dismembered body parts in a safe that he later deposits in a sinkhole outside of town. Her soul is violently ripped from her body and catapulted skyward, where she finds herself in a personal heaven of her own design. After Susie gets more used to being dead, she discovers she can watch her family and friends on Earth. She also finds out that she is not the only person Harvey has killed; he is a serial murderer with female victims of all ages. When Susie realizes her old classmate Ruth is able to sense her presence, she sees an opportunity to aid in the investigation of Harvey and maybe find justice for herself and the other girls and women he murdered.

Critical Evaluation
Although The Lovely Bones borders on being a fantasy novel, Susie’s voice and point of view are incredibly realistic. Sebold’s descriptions of Susie’s school crush, to the attack ending in her own murder, to her own personal heaven could have been written by a fourteen-year-old growing up in the 1970’s. Possibly the most important writing decision Sebold makes in The Lovely Bones is beginning the novel in 1973 instead of present day. Unlike the early 2000’s when the book was published, the molestation and murder of children was hardly acknowledged in previous decades. Crime existed, but people chose to believe it didn’t happen in their own community, especially in middle class, midwest neighborhoods like the one in which the Salmon family lives. This opinion of child disappearance makes it more difficult for Susie to find justice for herself from heaven, but makes for an achingly riveting story as Susie watches her attacker continue to live his life after taking hers away.

Author Information
Alice Sebold is an American writer and bestselling author of the book The Lovely Bones, hailed as the most successful debut novel since Gone With the Wind.

Synopsis
Alice Sebold was born on September 6, 1963, in Madison, Wisconsin. Sebold was brutally raped while a college undergraduate. Her account of the incident became the subject of her memoir, Lucky. Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, debuted in 2002, and proved to be a commercial and critical success. The author's second novel, The Almost Moon, was published in 2007.

Early Years
Born Alice Sebold on September 6, 1963, in Madison, Wisconsin. The daughter of two academic parents, Sebold grew up in a household dominated by dysfunction. Her mother, Jane, was an alcoholic, who suffered severe bouts of panic and anxiety, often leaving Sebold and her older sister Mary to take care of her.

Sebold's father, a Spanish professor, eventually relocated his family to Paoli, Pennsylvania, where Jane worked as a journalist for a small newspaper and he taught at the University of Pennsylvania. To help diffuse the difficulties her home life introduced, the argumentative and sarcastic Sebold took on the role of the "family moron."

"[They] seemed to have more fun, more freedom, and more personality," Sebold has said.

Tragedy Strikes
After high school, Sebold, in an attempt to distance herself from her family, enrolled at Syracuse University in upstate New York in the fall of 1980. But during her first year at the school, Sebold suffered a horrific event that would change her life. While walking back to her dorm one evening, she was brutally attacked and raped in a tunnel. Sebold eventually made it back to her room where friends took her to the hospital. After reporting her case to the police, one of the officers said she was "lucky" to be alive. Not long before, another rape had occurred in the same tunnel where Sebold had been attacked, that had resulted in a woman's death and dismemberment.

Sebold's attacker was eventually apprehended and sentenced to prison but, not surprisingly, finding closure wasn't easy for Sebold. "In my world, I saw violence everywhere," she later wrote. "It was not a song or a dream or a plot point." She was, however, determined to move forward, and returned to Syracuse to finish her degree.

Sebold's immediate post-college years only brought more trauma. Her parents, unable to process what had really happened to their daughter, proved to be of little support. After a failed attempt at graduate school in Texas, Sebold landed in New York City, where she started experimenting with heroin.

But there were some glimmers of hope. While working in an adjunct professorship position at Hunter College, Sebold discovered her gift for teaching. She then relocated to California and took a position as the caretaker of an arts colony. Sebold's living conditions put her in the middle of the woods without electricity, where she learned to embrace solitude.

She also continued to write, experimenting with a novel about the rape and murder of a young girl that she tentatively called Monsters. After some time, Sebold enrolled at University of Irvine for graduate school, where she met her husband, writer Glen David Gold. She graduated with an MFA in 1998.

Commercial Success
The story of Sebold's life and rape became the subject of her first book, a memoir called Lucky. Its name was inspired by the policeman who'd remarked that she was fortunate to be alive following her attack.

Broader fame came in 2002 when The Lovely Bones, a revised and edited incarnation of Sebold's earlier novel about the rape and murder of a young girl, was published. The book, whose narrator tells her story from beyond the grave, shot to the top of most "best" lists in 2002, earning ebullient praise from critics and outpacing the sales from works from more established authors, like Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Some even dared to call it the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind.

In addition, the book earned Sebold the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2002 and the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction the following year. In 2009, a film version of The Lovely Bones, starring Mark Wahlberg and Susan Sarandon, was released.

Five years after The Lovely Bones first hit bookshelves, Sebold published her second novel, The Almost Moon, which tells the story of the murder of an elderly woman by her suburban daughter in a fit of rage.

Personal Life
Alice Sebold lives with her husband in San Francisco.

Source: http://www.biography.com/people/alice-sebold-20702765

Genre
Fantasy

Fiction

Curriculum Ties
n/a

Booktalking Ideas
Introduce the character of Susie, emphasizing her plans for the future that were cut short when she was murdered and her determination to find justice for herself from heaven. Read the passage with her description of her personal heaven. Then give a rating from 1-5 and tell the audience why this is my rating, and take questions.

Reading Level/Interest Age
School Library Journal: Adult/High School

Challenging Issues
Death of a Loved One
Murder
Rape and Sexual Assault
Violence

Preparing for Potential Challenges
http://jeselynsminiyacollection.blogspot.com/p/preparing-for-potential-challenges.html

Why the Item Was Chosen
Fantasy is a popular genre among young adults, and I feel that The Lovely Bones is an equal balance between fantasy and more realistic fiction. The story being told from the perspective of a dead girl looking down on her family from heaven will interest spiritual patrons and patrons who enjoy in fantasy and science fiction materials. Descriptions of Susie’s creepy, murderous neighbor and the faltering investigation will interest patrons who like true crime. The almost-love story between Susie and a boy at school, as well as the family relationships, will keep straight-ahead fiction lovers engaged. I have included The Lovely Bones in my collection because it includes aspects that are appealing to a wide variety of readers. This is also another book that was adapted into a popular movie, so patrons who enjoyed the movie but not read the book will appreciate its presence on my shelves.