The Lovely Bones

September 3, 2007
Reading her breakout novel, Sebold's even, unemotional voice is a good match for both the drab setting of a Midwest town enduring the 1970s and for her matter-of-fact writing, which manages to seem grounded even as the protagonist narrates from heaven after her brutal murder. Sebold doesn't bother with voicing characters differently; the murdered girl, Susie Salmon, is the listener's window into the world she was forced to leave behind, and Sebold uses a flat, deliberate voice that manages to sound both weary and wistful. Snatches of melancholy chamber music close each track and provide more explicit emotion. What Sebold's voice lacks in stylistic flourish she makes up for with perfect pacing. In an introductory segment, Sebold recounts the novel's genesis and mentions that part of her working process involves reading everything back to herself, which explains her expert rhythm. On the final disc, Sebold reads the first chapter of her 2007 novel, The Almost Moon. While Sebold's fans will be eager for the chance to hear her read, the uninitiated may wish for a bit more passion in her presentation. A Back Bay Books paperback (Reviews, June 17, 2002).

I was 14 when I was murdered . . . . That's the opening and also the astonishing conceit of this first novel. It's narrated from heaven. Tricked, raped, and knifed to death, Susie Salmon was the sort of innocent who had just learned that "gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren't." The book was raved about in advance by Jonathan Franzen and Anna Quindlen, and so its success seems guaranteed. This is a dream, of course, a wish fulfillment, but this is a dream with grit. Alyssa Bresnahan brings the corpse to passionate life, her voice by turns ecstatic and heavy with tears. Susie dies still thinking of first kisses. When the novel closes, she's a woman fulfilled and has learned to "hold the world without me in it." B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Starred review from June 17, 2002
HSebold's first novel—after her memoir, Lucky—is a small but far from minor miracle. Sebold has taken a grim, media-exploited subject and fashioned from it a story that is both tragic and full of light and grace. The novel begins swiftly. In the second sentence, Sebold's narrator, Susie Salmon, announces, "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." Susie is taking a shortcut through a cornfield when a neighbor lures her to his hideaway. The description of the crime is chilling, but never vulgar, and Sebold maintains this delicate balance between homely and horrid as she depicts the progress of grief for Susie's family and friends. She captures the odd alliances forged and the relationships ruined: the shattered father who buries his sadness trying to gather evidence, the mother who escapes "her ruined heart, in merciful adultery." At the same time, Sebold brings to life an entire suburban community, from the mortician's son to the handsome biker dropout who quietly helps investigate Susie's murder. Much as this novel is about "the lovely bones" growing around Susie's absence, it is also full of suspense and written in lithe, resilient prose that by itself delights. Sebold's most dazzling stroke, among many bold ones, is to narrate the story from Susie's heaven (a place where wishing is having), providing the warmth of a first-person narration and the freedom of an omniscient one. It might be this that gives Sebold's novel its special flavor, for in Susie's every observation and memory—of the smell of skunk or the touch of spider webs—is the reminder that life is sweet and funny and surprising,. Agent, Henry Dunow. (July 3)Forecast:Sebold's memoir,
Lucky, was the account of her rape in 1981, at Syracuse University. It is, of course, impossible to read
The Lovely Bones without considering the memoir, but the novel moves Sebold effortlessly into literary territory. A long list of writers—including Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen—blurb
The Lovely Bones, and booksellers should expect the novel to move quickly; the early buzz has been considerable. Foreign rights have been sold in England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Spain and Sweden, with film rights to Film Four.