The Lovely Bones novel reviewed

The first time that The Lovely Bones came into my radar, I'm sure like a good number of people, was when Peter Jackson made his adaption of it which got slaughtered by the public.  Whether it was deserved or not, I don't know since I haven't seen it but it did plant the desire to read the book in my mind.  But it took me a few months afterwords to actually get around to checking it out at the library.  So now that I've read it and all, it's time to dig in, not literally of course, into The Lovely Bones.

So there's this 14-year old girl named Suzie Salmon, like the fish, who's on her way to home from school.  She bumps into her creepy neighbor Mr. Harvey who wants Suzie to see his hidey-hole and by that I mean rape and kill her.  So now she's in heaven and she's looking down on her family and how they are going through this terrible tragedy.  Now all she can do is just watch helplessly as her father grows suspicious of Mr. Harvey and tries to get the police to investigate him further which causes a rift in the family.

Now, for some reason or another, I've been thinking of my own mortality and what happens after we die.  Of course, this somewhat scares me whether this an afterlife or not but The Lovely Bones did put me at peace with mortality.  It doesn't talk about heaven a lot but when it does, it does paint a great picture with Heaven being whatever made you the happiest.  But the wonderful use of imagery doesn't stop at heaven.  The aftermath of the murder is also told in such a way that it does feel real.  It's written in a way that's utterly believable.  A lesser book would probably focus on the mystery but that isn't the point, it's all about acceptance.

However, at times the writing gets a bit full of itself.  It does go overboard in its descriptions to the point of it being written in the dreaded purple prose.  No one has pale skin, it's moonlight glow.  The mother's eyes aren't pretty, they're like oceans...but then again, two of the characters do comment on it quite a bit.  And I realize that the whole mystery isn't the point of this book but it still feels perfunctorily.  It's there, at times it may move the plot along but the book doesn't really regard it as all that important, even at the beginning when it's the most important.

This book may have flashes of being pretentious, it is still a good read.  The heaven passages are amazing.  When it's not being written in purple prose, it does have an hypnotic factor to it.  If anything, it reminds me of Watchmen where it's more of an experience rather than a narrative story and who knows, maybe it would benefit from having order put into this chaos with a movie since there are some rooms for improvement but don't think of me being too hard on the book.  It's still really good, it's just flawed.

8/10