A shiver through the spine (The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)

I’d been avoiding reading The Lovely Bones because for a while everyone seemed to be reading it, and it wasn’t really my type of book. I don’t like dramatic fiction, especially domestic dramas. I find them very stressful to read, sometimes even traumatic, like a A Heart of Stone. Sometimes, it’s just nothing spectacular for me, like The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

The trade paperback I mooched had been languishing in my TBR for over a year already, and I dreaded reading it, but it was taunting me (yes, it all happens in my mind) so I decided it was time to conquer this book.

It surprised me, actually, because as much as I was prepared not to like it, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, which goes to show how going out of your comfort zone once in a while can be rewarding.

The Lovely Bones (book #131 for 2009) is the story of a young girl named Susie Salmon. And she’s dead.

Susie has been raped and murdered by their strange next door neighbor, and her spirit lingers to watch how life goes on without her, how her family and friends — and even the killer — deal with her death in different ways. The small town is ablaze with speculation about her disappearance, the killer adds her to the string of victims he’s collected over the years, and her family slowly disintegrates as they try to come to terms with the traumatic  blow her death has brought upon them.

I’ve seen my share of crime and suspense documentaries, because my sister loves watching them day in and day out, especially when nothing else catches her fancy on TV. I watch them with her once in a while, but the horror gets to me after three or four episodes, and I have to stop watching so I can cheer myself up.

Susie’s story, The Lovely Bones, is much like those crime and suspense documentaries in the beginning, except that it goes on to tells us what happens in the background, the things that happen outside of the investigation – how the community reacts, how the family takes the tragedy, and even how the victim herself struggles to accept her fate.

Susie is not quite in heaven yet, but in some sort of in-between heaven that still connects her to the world she left behind. Susie’s heaven is some sort of perfect world, where everyone has a personalized version of  what their heaven is, made up of their simplest dreams while they were still alive. Thus, in her heaven, Susie has a gal pal named Holly, and a school with swing sets, no teachers,  day-long art classes, and fashion magazines as textbooks.

This teen heaven (I remember an old book series I read, Teen Angels) is perfect, but Susie feels stifled in it, as she would give everything to be alive again. Susie uses the snowglobe as a metaphor for her heaven:

Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father used to pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, “Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.”

The book also gives us an insight into the character of the killer, his childhood experiences and how this shaped his psychosis, a creepy  but all too real reminder that the killer has his own story too, and is human like the rest of us, no matter how brutal his deeds.

Of the family, who each had their own  ways of dealing with grief, I felt really bad for Buckley. He was only a toddler when Susie was killed, and I felt that the family, specifically the parents, were too caught up in themselves to properly explain to Buckley what had happened. At first they try to keep the information from him, and bribed him when he asked questions, and then later on just told him he won’t see Susie anymore, which he did not fully understand. I imagine it must have been confusing for him, and I don’t blame him for the resentment that built up in him as he grew up.

While there was a lot of domestic drama in this book, I appreciate that it was relevant to the story. I didn’t love the book to pieces, but I found it unique, compelling, and surprisingly optimistic.  I laud Alice Sebold in being able to write this book drawn from her personal experience of being raped as a young girl, and translating  her experience into how Susie comes to terms with her own death.

The film adaptation is coming out this year, directed by no less than Peter Jackson, and starring a powerhouse cast, including Mark Wahlberg (as Jack Salmon — Ryan Gosling got dropped from the movie), Rachel Weisz  (Abigail Salmon), Stanley Tucci (George Harvey); and Susan Sarandon (Grandma Lynn).  Saoirse Ronan plays Susie Salmon.

I like the fact that Peter Jackson read the book and brings his response to the book to the big screen. The teamwork with Dreamworks ought to be good, as they create Susie’s 14 year old idea of heaven.

Here’s the trailer, courtesy of trusteddouble on youtube:

***
my copy: trade paperback, upgraded into hardcover (bought at Book Sale for P70)

my rating: 4/5 stars