The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)- A Long Overdue Review

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"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 that my death wrought 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 body had been my life." -Susie Salmon, The Lovely Bones-      Tonight, I put  down this lovely book with tears in my eyes. All I can say is that it is absolutely amazing. I saw the movie before I read the book and this, I deeply regret. Susie Salmon, a normal fourteen-year old girl who dreams of becoming a wildlife photographer someday, was murdered gruesomely by a man who was her neighbor. Her body, which was once whole, was thrown into a giant sinkhole by her killer. Now, she watches Earth helplessly from her heaven, inhabiting a body that is made of air, light and unfeeling. Now, she watches her family grieve by isolating themselves from each other, and follows her killer in his own isolated world as he dodges authorities and calculates future murders.       The thing is, we all have our thoughts about death. Despite our fear of its inevitability, as humans, we can't avoid envisioning it. I have my own ideas about it, formed from the stories I've heard and from the things I've seen. These ideas pile up but nothing seems to stick, until The Lovely Bones. The suspension of the soul makes sense, but not like the theory about these souls being in the same place as we are albeit in a non-physical form. Instead, they are suspended in a completely different world that touches ours ever so slightly, and we only catch the slightest glimpse of them in the rarest of moments when these two worlds intersect due to the slight changes in the light and in the heart of those people who they loved on Earth. We are not alone, and though that may sound scary at times, it can be beautiful. Them passing away doesn't mean that the love they felt for us is reduced, or that they don't remember us anymore and there's only bitterness in them now. They remember. They're with us, watching as we grow apart because of their absence, hoping that we'll come home again. Susie proved it.