When we first meet Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. As she looks down from this strange new place, she tells us, in the fresh and spirited voice of a fourteen-year-old girl, a tale that is both haunting and full of hope.

In the weeks following her death, Susie watches life continuing without her -- her school friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her family holding out hope that she'll be found, her killer trying to cover his tracks. As months pass without leads, Susie sees her parents' marriage being contorted by loss, her sister hardening herself in an effort to stay strong, and her little brother trying to grasp the meaning of the word "gone."

Alice Sebold's writing takes a lot out of me. She's brutally honest, and painfully clear when describing the heartache of the Salmon family -- the anguish of her parents, Abigail and Jack, who enetered separate hells after the incident; the walls Lindsey built around herself just to get through each day; the way Buckley at first didn't understand what happened, and later resented the effect it had on his family.

Like Susie, I was more interested in what was happening to the living in The Lovely Bones than I was with Susie's new home in the heaven Sebold created for her. I found it appropriate that while the living (the Salmon family, Ruth, Lindsey's friends at school, and Len Fenerman, the detective assigned to the case) spent so much time thinking of the dead, the dead were watching and concentrating on the living.

One of the many scenes that tore at my heart was when Jack destroyed the bottled sailboats Susie had helped him create. The image of a man broken by grief raging at those easily breakable glassworks brought tears to my eyes. And though I can make the connection between the fragile glass of the bottles and the fragile life of a child, I'm left wondering whether there was any significance behind the yellow daffodils Abigail left for Susie throughout the story.

As with Lucky, Sebold's powerful writing far surpassed what I had expected, and I would highly recommend both books to readers who like being moved by the stories they enjoy, even the sad ones.

I took this to tonight's Meetup at St. Elmo's. It almost was picked up by another BookCrosser, but ultimately she decided her pile of to-be-read books was big enough (I know that feeling).

I'll find somewhere else to release it soon. :)

Planned release at my old favorite coffee shop - St. Elmo's!

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