The Lovely Bones The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold.

It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from her personal Heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death. The novel received much critical praise and became an instant bestseller. A film adaptation of the novel, directed by Peter Jackson who personally purchased the rights, was released in American theatres on January 15, 2010, and in the UK on February 15, 2010. The novel's title is a quotation taken from the novel's end, where Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death: These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.[1] Commercial and critical reception Alice Sebold in 2007 Sebold's novel was a surprise success when it was first published, mainly because it was written by a young author known only for one other book. In addition, the plot and narrative device are unusual and unconventional. It would have been considered a success by Little, Brown and Company had it sold 20,000 copies, but it ultimately sold over a million and remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year. Some of that could have been attributed to adroit marketing. Prior to its June publication, an excerpt was run in Seventeen. Shortly afterwards, ABC's Good Morning America chose it for itsbook club. The book became a popular summer read and a runaway success, with much of its sales subsequently attributed to word of mouth. Critics also helped the novel's success by being generally positive, many noting that the story had more promise than the idea of a brutally murdered teenage girl going to heaven and following her family and friends as they get on with their lives would have suggested. "This is a high-wire act for a first novelist, and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance", wrote Katherine Bouton in The New York Times Book Review.[2] The novel also sold well in other English-speaking countries, though reviews were not as glowing. While admitting the novel "has its very fine moments", The Guardian's Ali Smith ultimately said, "The Lovely Bones is so keen in the end to comfort us and make safe its world that, however well-meaning, it avoids its own ramifications".[3] Her Observer colleague Philip Hensher was more blunt, conceding that the novel was "very readable" but "ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy".[4] Depiction of Heaven Because Susie's character is narrating the story from her own personal heaven, there are some questions over the depiction of the afterlife. Some readers[who?] with a Fundamentalist Christianperspective faulted Susie's heaven for being utterly devoid of any apparent religious aspect. "It's a very God-free heaven, with no suggestion that anyone has been judged, or found wanting," Hensher stated. Sebold, who was raised Episcopalian, intended the heaven to be simplistic in design: "To me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys but it's very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those things. It's also about discovery, and being able to come to the conclusions that elude you in life. So it's from the most simplistic things Susie wants a duplex to larger things, like being able to understand why her mother was always slightly distant from her."[5] Furthermore, Sebold has stated that the book is not intended to be religious, "but if people want to take things and interpret them, then I can't do anything about that. It is a book that has faith and hope and giant universal themes in it, but it's not meant to be, 'This is the way you should look at the afterlife'".[6] Film adaptation Main article: The Lovely Bones (film) Director Peter Jackson secured the book's film rights. In a 2005 interview, he stated the reader has "an experience when you read the book that is unlike any other. I don't want the tone or the mood to be different or lost in the film." In the same interview, regarding Susie's heaven, he said the movie version would endeavor to make it appear "somehow ethereal and emotional, but it can't be hokey".[7]The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Jack Salmon, Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, Rachel Weisz as Abigail Salmon, Saoirse Ronan as Susie Susan Sarandon as Susie's grandmother, Lynn and Rose McIver as Lyndsey Salmon. The film opened to a limited release in three U.S. theaters on December 11, 2009.[8] It received international and wide release on January 15, 2010. It met with mixed reviews, but nonetheless garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Tucci).

This deluxe trade paperback edition of Alice Sebold's modern classic features French flaps and rough-cut pages. Once in a generation a novel comes along that taps a vein of universal human experience, resonating with readers of all ages. The Lovely Bones is such a book - a phenomenal #1 bestseller celebrated at once for its narrative artistry, its luminous clarity of emotion, and its astoniishing power to lay claim to the hearts of millions of readers around the world. "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on eath continue without her - her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her griefstricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable traged and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy "A stunning achievement." -The New Yorker "Deeply affecting... A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time." -New York Times "A triumphant novel... It's a knockout." -Time "Destined to become a classic in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird... I loved it." -Anna Quindlen "A novel that is painfully fine and accomplished." -Los Angeles Times "The Lovely Bones seems to be saying there are more important things in life on earth than retribution. Like forgiveness, like love." -Chicago Tribune

"Sebold has given us a fantasy-fable of great authority, charm, and daring. She's a one-of-a-kind writer." Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections

"Ms. Sebold's achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Arts section review

"A small but far from minor miracle...a story that is both tragic and full of light and grace...full of suspense and written in lithe, resilient prose that by itself delights." Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"Masterful" and "compelling.... Sebold's beautiful novel shows how a

tragedy can tear a family apart, and bring them back together again. She challenges us to re-imagine happy endings, as she brings the novel to a conclusion that is unfalteringly magnificent. And she paints, with an artist's precision, a portrait of a world where the terrible and the miraculous can and do co-exist." Booklist

"The Lovely Bones is one of the strangest experiences I have had as a reader in a long time, and one of the most memorable. Painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad, it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief." Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

"What a wonderful writer Alice Sebold is. Out of darkness she makes light, out of despair and violence, beauty, out of deep loss a peculiar, hard-won gain. All her characters, for good or ill, travel to surprising places, and so do we, her extremely fortunate readers." Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture

"Set in a heaven as real and possible as the earth is mysterious and shifting, The Lovely Bones explores, with clear-eyed affection and wit, the romance of family life, the shy, funny turbulence of adolescence, and the painful tracks love and loss make through our world." Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold (born September 6, 1963) is an American novelist. She has published three books: Lucky (1999), The Lovely Bones (2002) and The Almost Moon (2007).

Early life
Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and graduated from Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania in 1980. She then enrolled in Syracuse University. In the early hours of May 8, 1981, she was raped by a young black man while walking home through a park off campus. She reported the crime to the police, who took her statement and remarked that a young woman had once been murdered in the same location.[1] Sebold returned home to Pennsylvania to live with her family for the summer before beginning her sophomore year at Syracuse. After some months at home Sebold returned to Syracuse to finish her bachelor's degree and to study writing. Months later, in early October 1981, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she recognized her rapist and reported him to police; she later testified against him, and he received the maximum sentence.[1] Following graduation from Syracuse, Sebold went to the University of Houston[2] in Texas for graduate school. She did not complete her graduate studies, but fell into drugs. Then she moved toManhattan and lived there for 10 years. She held several jobs as a waitress and tried to pursue her writing career.[3] Sebold wanted to write her story through poetry, but that, and attempts at writing a novel, did not come to fruition. She used heroin recreationally for two years, though claims she never became addicted.[4] Sebold recounted her substance abuse to students at an Evening of Fictionworkshop by saying that, "I did a lot of things that I am not particularly proud of and that I cant believe that I did."[5]

Sebold left the city and moved to Southern California, where she became a caretaker of an arts colony, earning $386 a month and living in a cabin in the woods without electricity. She would write under a propane lamp.[1] In 1995, Sebold applied to graduate school at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Alice Sebold's first published book, many years in the making, was a memoir of her rape as an eighteen-yearold college freshman. Four months later, in September 1981 she returned to Syracuse University, the scene of the rape, and finished her degree.[specify] She studied writing, and wanted to write her story then, but kept failing. "I wrote tons of bad poetry about it and a couple of bad novels about it--lots of bad stuff," Sebold told Dennis McLellan of the Los Angeles Times. She explained to McLellan why the novels were not successful: "I felt the burden of trying to write a story that would encompass all rape victims' stories and that immediately killed the idea of this individual character in the novel. So [the novels] tended to be kind of fuzzy and bland, and I didn't want to make any political missteps."

Career
While at UCI, Sebold began writing Lucky, a memoir of her rape. The police had told Sebold that she was lucky to be alive; not long before Sebold's attack, another young woman had been killed and dismembered in the same tunnel.[1] The story began while she was writing a ten-page assignment, though Sebold eventually wrote 40 pages for her class. After Lucky, Sebold published the bestselling novel The Lovely Bones. The book is a novel about a 14-year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered. The main character tells her story from her personalized version of Heaven, looking down as her family tries to cope with her death and her killer escapes the police. While working on The Lovely Bones in 1995, Sebold met her husband Glen David Gold at UCI. He arrived late for one of his classes and couldn't take his hat off, and they began talking. They were married in November 2001. In an interview conducted by Ann Darby of Publishers Weekly, Sebold said of The Lovely Bones: "I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us."[6] The novel was adapted into a 2009 film of the same name by Peter Jackson. Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, continued what The New Yorker called "Sebold's fixation on terror." It begins: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." Sebold edited The Best American Short Stories 2009. The process, she said, required her to read and choose twenty of over 200 short stories she was presented with to put in the book.[7] ]Awards Sebold won the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003[8] for The Lovely Bones and the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2002. She was also nominated in the Novel category in that year.[9] Sebold is an alumna of the Ragdale Foundation.

Works
  

Lucky (memoir, 2002; originally published in 1999), Back Bay Books, ISBN 0-316-66634-3 The Lovely Bones (novel, 2002), Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-66634-3 The Almost Moon (novel, 2007), Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-67746-9