Alice Sebold ’ s The Lovely Bones concerns the effects on a class of a fierce intimate rape and mangle of a young adolescent. This is narrated in chapter 1. What is astonishing is that the narrator is the victim herself, Susie Salmon, dead and able to roam the global from “ her ” eden. This is one rightfully all-knowing narrator .
While Susie is able to tell us what each of the significant people in her life are doing and feel, she ’ s not able to do anything but observe. This powerlessness over events echoes the powerlessness of her murder, but she learns that she can make common sense of events and of life itself through her observations.
This is one of the least sentimental novels one can ever read. The set-up blaze possibilities of real tear-jerking slop. Sebold ’ s wallow rests in her hard looks and unflinching gaze as a class learns to deal with what we all imagine to be the worst tragedy potential. And they do each answer differently and not always easily. Her father, Jack Salmon, relentlessly pursues the theme of finding the killer. Her beget, Abigail, disappears into the nightmare, knows that she must get on, questions her marriage and her life and resents her husband ’ randomness intents. The siblings each besides answer, her younger sister becoming a cutthroat youthful woman with a preference for her father ’ mho devotion to revenge ( ? ) her toddler brother growing up in a theater marked by a tragedy he never actually have .
Susie ’ south moral is the passing of prison term. She misses land adenine much as her syndicate misses her, but it all changes. Her heaven is pleasant and has possibilities that she slowly begins to grasp. Over time and with early animation events the syndicate collapses. But they adjust even into this crumble, evolve into a new potency.
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There is an acute sadness in this book that is dappled with the light of casual life and what has to become the new normal. Susie ’ mho evolution reflects her syndicate ’ sulfur as the years travel by and she becomes more haunt than person. Sebold takes a bluff pace in giving Susie one addict luck to come to terms with her earthly self ; many deem it a actual success and the get down of a dependable goal to the expatriate and tragedy. Others might see it as less than successful but it is a part of her report and Sebold, in the end, makes it work .
The Salmons are everlastingly changed on the fateful day of their love one ’ randomness murder. Susie ’ s perspective helps us to see the changes well and up close, a partake of a separate, the acceptance of the hardest tragedy conceivable .