Tolog Review: The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
reviewed by Chase Hayes

In Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, we are introduced to our narrator Susie Salmon who is brutally murdered in 1973 at the age of 14. She is walking home one normal day from school and decides to take a shortcut through a cornfield in her neighborhood because it was getting dark. A man she didn’t personally know, but recognized lures her into a manmade, underground shelter in the cornfield. He then rapes and murders her. Susie watches her family from her own heaven as they try to cope with her abrupt death and all the challenges they face. They spend a lot of time trying to solve who murdered her.

Sebold uses a lot of figurative language throughout the book to give us extra details and a deeper understanding of what she is explaining. Sebold does an excellent job setting the scene by using visual imagery when she says, “Large, squat buildings spread out on dismally landscaped sandy lots, with overhangs and open spaces to make them feel more modern" (Sebold 16). Sebold talks about Susie’s heaven and you get a very descriptive picture of what it looks like. When she describes situations, she does a great job of making you feel scared by using similes and verbal irony. As Susie’s murderer goes through all of his victims’ little knick knacks, Sebold says, “He would count them like beads on a rosary” (Sebold 126). You start to get creeped out as he slowly counts them all because they are his prized possessions, like he is proud of killing all of the women. Finally, when Susie’s murderer disposes of her remains a women jokingly asks, “What you got in there, a dead body?” (Sebold 52). This is ironic because she has no idea that there actually is a dead body in the safe, but the reader knows.

I loved this book so much and would totally recommend it for others. While reading The Lovely Bones, I could not put the book down because it’s very suspenseful and exhilarating. In each chapter something new and surprising gets sprung on you. Sebold makes me feel all the different emotions that the characters are feeling, to the point where I don’t feel like I am reading a book, but actually in the book.