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The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold Books

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The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold Books

I had read several good reviews of this one, so I decided to read it for myself. Sebold, a rape survivor herself, tells the story of 14 year old Susie watching from heaven as her family tries to come to grips with her rape and murder. It was a beautiful, disturbing and memorable book. Her idea of heaven doesn't correspond with mine, but that's a minor point. The book was well-written--she goes back and forth in time with memories and yet it flows smoothly. If you think you can handle it, you should read this haunting novel.


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The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold Books Reviews

I would recommend this book as it was recommended to me . It made one think about what becomes of us when we die. It lets our imagination go to more possibilities of what our life could be like when we pass on, whether a terrible death or at the end of a long and happy life. As many believe the dead can return and influence these we leave behind. It makes life after death not as scary if we can see what how such a terrible death can change those wee care about.
This book is in no way easy to read. It starts out with a graphic account of 18 year old Alice Sebold's rape. I say account because it is mostly just facts, but that doesn't make it any easier to read. However I do think it was necessary to know the details to be able to understand how a horrible ordeal that lasted an hour affects the victim forever in so many different ways. It's a story of courage but without a halo. Sebold doesn't come off as having all the answers. She just explains how she got through the rape, trial and its aftermath. And she didn't do it without difficulty.

The book strikes me as clinical in many ways, in particular Sebold's account of the trial and the defense attorney's attempt to exonerate his client. The facts themselves are enough to indict the legal system that always tries to blame the female victim. However, in this case, the prosecutors had a nearly perfect victim. Sebold was a virgin before the rape, was brutally beaten in easily photographed ways, had not used drugs or alcohol and after a few initial stumbles, is able to catch on to the defense lawyer's attempts to cast a bad light on her or twist her words. I really appreciate that the book didn't become a raging diatribe at any point. It simply points out ,as Sebold says, that being a woman can suck, because they are always trying to smash you down. Even the aftermath of the rape and Sebold's trying to get on with her life after the rapist's conviction rings very true and is touching without trying to emotionally manipulate.

If you want to know how such a brutal crime can affect you or simply read about someone who made it through, it's worth reading this book.
Very well written and the little details of human interaction and observation are what makes this story so unique and special. As a new mother, the beautiful parent-child perspectives caused me to stop and look at my parents anew. I also look at my little baby girl and can't imagine this happening to her but that's the world we live with, I suppose. Horrible and lovely all at once. Well done.
Reading this book after watching the movie adapted from it was enjoyable. I seek these out and am usually rewarded. As I read..reflecting on the changes that were made adds a level of comfort to the read. Highly recommend this book and the movie.
Frankly, you'd have to be sick to "love" this book. It opens with a horrifyingly detailed description of the author's rape when she was a virginal college freshman. Then it describes her experiences with a police/court system that put rape at the bottom of it's priority list. It's brutal and depressing. It's also a book that you'll be glad you read and that you'll never forget.

I bought this book over two years ago because it was on sale and the description sounded fascinating, if forbidding. It took me two years to work up to reading it and another six months to work up to reviewing it. It's a hard book to read and an even harder book to talk about.

I DIDN'T buy it because it was written by a best-selling author. I was vaguely aware that there was a much-talked-about movie "The Lovely Bones" and that it was based on a novel. But I never read new fiction and I failed to connect that book and it's author with this one. Now, of course, I see the connection. Ms. Sebold first fictionalized her rape, then (when she was able) she wrote about it as the shocking truth it was and is.

Because rape is a crime that no victim walks away from without deep, lasting scars. Even a strong, confident woman must deal with the anger, fear, and shame of being forcibly, brutally raped. And Alice Sebold was as vulnerable as any young woman who ever lived.

I DID love the beautifully told, deeply sad story of her childhood in a suburb in Pennsylvania. It was a neighborhood of families who had "made it" and their children should have been living "Leave It to Beaver" lives. But the Sebold parents bore no resemblance to the warm, loving Cleavers. Both husband and wife were running from the demons of their own childhoods - poverty, harsh parents, unreasonable expectations. Two people who are drowning in their own inner turmoil have little left to give their children.

Mr. Sebold was a brilliant academician. Absent physically much of the time and absent emotionally ALL the time, he left the care of his two young daughters to his wife. The fact that she was an alcoholic did not (in his mind) disqualify her from raising their children. When she was drunk, he closed the door to their bedroom and told his daughters "Mommy has a headache." Then he went back to his books.

Eventually, Mrs. Sebold stopped drinking, but she never dealt with the cause - her anger at being forced into a role that she didn't want and wasn't able to fulfill. If times had been different, she and her husband might been a contented childless professional couple. But that wasn't how things were done in the 1950's. Mrs. Sebold retreated from life as a full-time mother into the comfort of alcohol. Deprived of booze, she replaced it with crippling anxiety attacks. Her husband retreated into his professional life and their daughters got along as best they could.

Having been raised by a woman who loved being mother to a large family and a father who felt at least SOME some responsibility for parenting his children, I cannot imagine the sadness of the author's childhood. As she says, they were NEVER a family, but "four solitary souls" living in the same house. Alice Sebold was raped emotionally many times before a stranger dragged her into a secluded tunnel.

Her older sister Mary was a pleaser and an achiever. She was taking her final college exams when her younger sister was raped. Alice was more of a rebel than her sister, but neither of them escaped their mother's strict rules and her obsession with sexual purity. Was she hoping to keep her daughters virgins so that they didn't make the "mistake" of having children of their own? If so, it worked.

Sebold's story of her family's reaction to her rape is almost unbelievable and yet it's probably more common than otherwise. Typically, her mother focused on creating the proper outfit for her daughter to wear to court. Clothes make the rape victim, right? Her father made painful and sometimes surprisingly effective attempts to comfort his daughter, but nothing in their history made it easy for him to give love or for her to accept it.

Equally fascinating were the reactions of the young people around her. Expecting little support from her parents, she reached out to her peers with sometimes startling results. And she was forced to come to terms with the fact that her rape was NOT a passing phenomenon, but a last legacy. She had joined a club that no one wants to be a member of.

The story has a happy ending. Alice Sebold went on to find a rewarding life as a teacher of creative writing. She says her students "saved" her. And she eventually became an acclaimed writer. No one could be more deserving of her "luck."

I'm glad I read this book. It's one I'll never forget.
Yes, we survivors can tell in a second of eye contact.
Alice's courage may be appreciated by many, but is viscerally appreciated by other victims.
Her prose and the rhythm of her writing makes this memoir all the more powerful--as if the story weren't horrific and devastating enough, of the rape and of being forced to live the rest of your life with the flinching and rage of someone who has been forever altered by having been raped.
Thank you, Alice Sebold.
I had read several good reviews of this one, so I decided to read it for myself. Sebold, a rape survivor herself, tells the story of 14 year old Susie watching from heaven as her family tries to come to grips with her rape and murder. It was a beautiful, disturbing and memorable book. Her idea of heaven doesn't correspond with mine, but that's a minor point. The book was well-written--she goes back and forth in time with memories and yet it flows smoothly. If you think you can handle it, you should read this haunting novel.