Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I wasn't completely sure what to expect from this book but what I ended up reading was something really good. I was recommended this book by my mom because it had a satisfying ending (for my BiblioGames readathon) but I'm not sure the end was my as satisfying as I had hoped.
Synopsis
The Lovely Bones is the story of a family devastated by a gruesome murder -- a murder recounted by the teenage victim. Upsetting, you say? Remarkably, first-time novelist Alice Sebold takes this difficult material and delivers a compelling and accomplished exploration of a fractured family's need for peace and closure.
The details of the crime are laid out in the first few pages: from her vantage point in heaven, Susie Salmon describes how she was confronted by the murderer one December afternoon on her way home from school. Lured into an underground hiding place, she was raped and killed. But what the reader knows, her family does not. Anxiously, we keep vigil with Susie, aching for her grieving family, desperate for the killer to be found and punished.
Sebold creates a heaven that's calm and comforting, a place whose residents can have whatever they enjoyed when they were alive -- and then some. But Susie isn't ready to release her hold on life just yet, and she intensely watches her family and friends as they struggle to cope with a reality in which she is no longer a part. To her great credit, Sebold has shaped one of the most loving and sympathetic fathers in contemporary literature.
Almost all of this book was truly incredible. I was hooked from the catchline on the back of the book that said something like "My name is Susie Salmon, like the fish, and December something was the day I was murdered." I assumed it would be told strictly from the perspective of Susie watching people down on Earth. However it was more than that, there were bits of information about her killer Mr. Harvey (not a spoiler, you learn this in the first chapter) throughout the book, like what made him into a serial killer. Things about Susie's mother and father, Ray & Ruth, Lindsey & Samuel, just all the characters had depth and that was something that I really enjoyed. At one point, later in the book, I started crying at the reconnection of two characters (Susie's parents in the hospital) and their quiet moment together, I don't know why but it struck something in me because their relationship fell apart but they were able to come back together for a brief moment to remember their past.
One thing that made this book a four star read was that there was also a lot of extra, not important, information that just dragged this book on and on. I ended up skimming these sections and getting to the parts of the book I was actually interested in. Although this extra detail that I found too much, was what made this book full of meat and shows that it is a mature story. This is one of the few young adult books that I've read that has more depth as a whole, rather than just individual plot points having depth. I'm praising this, but still it is something that made this book less enjoyable because I felt like while there could've been this intense depth, there should've been less in my personal opinion.
The whole time I was reading the book, I kept saying to my mom that "If the ending doesn't have some sort of resolve I'm going to be upset with the entirety of the book" and this still holds true, however I'm somewhere in the middle on what I thought of the ending. It wasn't the exact result I was wanting (which would've been catching Susie's killer and having some resolve to the murder) but it wasn't a complete disappointment. There were parts of it that I enjoyed, including some wrap-up with characters and such but it wasn't the ending that I had been anticipating for the whole book and that's why I'm kind of torn on whether or not this was truly a satisfying ending. I guess part of it was satisfying.. and therefore it counts.. but I'm still just thinking about it like I wanted a little more.
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