Status
Available
Call number
Description
Fiction. Literature. HTML:"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her �?? her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even j
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Collection
Publication
Back Bay Books (2009), Edition: 1 Mti Rep, Paperback, 368 pages
Pages
368
Genres
Physical description
368 p.; 5.34 x 0.95 inches
Awards
Women's Prize for Fiction (Longlist — 2003)
Commonwealth Club of California Book Awards (Silver Medal — 2002)
Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award (Nominee — Winner — 2005)
Kentucky Bluegrass Award (Nominee — Grades 9-12 — 2004)
Buckeye Children's & Teen Book Award (Nominee — Teen — 2005)
Bram Stoker Award (Nominee — Novel — 2002)
Gateway Readers Award (Nominee — 1st Place — 2005)
Indies Choice Book Award (Winner — Adult Fiction — 2003)
British Book Award (Winner — 2004)
Lincoln Award: Illinois Teen Readers' Choice Award (Nominee — 2005)
Colorado Blue Spruce Award (Nominee — 2005)
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize (Fiction — 2002)
Iowa High School Book Award (Winner — 2005)
South Carolina Book Awards (Winner — Young Adult Book Award — 2005)
Whitcoulls Top 100 Books (10 — 2010)
Best Fiction for Young Adults (Selection — 2003)
Waterstones top 25 books of the last 25 years (No 13 — 2007)
Media reviews
Library Journal
Sebold's compelling and sometimes poetic prose style and unsparing vision transform Susie's tragedy into an ultimately rewarding novel.
Although some sections tend toward melodrama... other passages are dreamy and lyrical. Most striking is Sebold's mastery of a teenager's voice, from such small details as Susie's Strawberry-Banana Kissing Potion to her completely believable thought processes.
Kirkus Reviews
An extraordinary, almost-successful debut that treats sensational material with literary grace, narrated from heaven by the victim of a serial killer and pedophile.
Don't start "Lovely Bones" unless you can finish it. The book begins with more horror than you could imagine, but closes with more beauty than you could hope for.
Sebold takes an enormous risk in her wonderfully strange début novel: her narrator, Susie Salmon, is dead—murdered at the age of fourteen by a disturbed neighbor—and speaks from the vantage of Heaven. Such is the author's skill that from the first page this premise seems utterly believable...
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If in the end she reaches too far, the book remains a stunning achievement. Show Less
This is a high-wire act for a first novelist, and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance.
"My name was Salmon, like the fish: first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." Go ahead, read it again. Almost everything that makes The Lovely Bones the breakout fiction debut of the year — the sweetness, the humor, the kicky rhythm, the deadpan suburban gothic
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— is right there, packed into those first two lines, under pressure and waiting to explode.
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The Lovely Bones is a quick, compelling read, and though it's not heavy, neither is it light summer reading. It's a slight, serious novel that almost comes across like a narrated photo album, with each searing, carefully selected image worth its requisite thousand words.
It's a risky novel that gracefully succeeds. One character mentions another character's gift for describing things that "made her feel as if she knew exactly what it felt like — not just what it looked like."
Which is what Sebold does so well, making readers feel what her characters feel — in
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life and death. Show Less
A luminescent debut novel that does something rare in the world of fiction—it conjures a fully realized imaginative universe that is both tangible and ethereal, creating a sublime friction between reality and ghostliness, the now and the nevermore.
What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time.
LCC
PS3619.E26 L68
Subjects
Language
ISBN
0316044938 / 9780316044936