The Lovely Bones

The lovely bones is a tragic novel about a little girl who is murdered.

The story is told from her point of view, her name is Susie Salmon, the story is told from her place in heaven. Although I am a major atheist, even I enjoyed this novel, it is a clever piece and defiantly Alice Sebold's best so far. It combines dry wit with dramatic happenings and captured my heart on the first page.

The clever thing about the novel is that Susie follows her killer Mr Harvey as well as her own family, the best thing is that we find out the killer straight away, it isn't a detective crime thriller- not really. The novel has a frame of romance that I wasn't expecting in this kind of book and the author has written it as a sort of- every cloud has a silver lining type way, we can see the characters developing, some getting happier and some moving off to different places but all of them growing up in their own way, whether they're adult or child.

The book is compelling enough to read in a single sitting, I know I did, it is also long enough not to be disappointed. It fits with the theme with the rest of Alice Sebold's novels too.

Parts of the novel toggle your frame of mind, like with the murderer Mr. Harvey, Susie toggles our frame of mind by changing our opinion of his slightly, Sebold manages to change our opinion back as he commits more murders.

All in all it is a brilliant novel, a definite must read whether you are a boy or a girl. I was asked by a friend of mine- why are you reading that man?, its a girls book. I shrugged my shoulders and said, hey there's no such thing.Forget the genre, forget the stereotype, this is a good book and has a very exciting and clever plot. My rating: 9/10