#22 A book that scares you: The Lovely Bones, by: Alice Sebold.
I planned on doing a movie comparison for this book, but after reading this novel, I’m going to simply add it at the end of this book review in a short summary.
Susie Salmon was barely a teenager when her life came to an end. One day, she walked home from school, unaware of the plan that was put in store for her fate. After the deed is done, her murderer goes back to his home and washes off the evidence, while her family has dinner unaware that she has left their world. When anger turns to worry, her parents realize something must have happened, and the search for their daughter begins. Days, weeks, months passed, and then years. Whether or not the killer is caught, Susie Salmon is dead, and nothing in the world can bring her back. Susie watches from heaven as her family deals with her loss, each taking a different path to mourn her. Everyone she ever loved, or loved her, would be changed by her murder. How do you deal with the death of someone you love?
This book didn’t scare me the way a horror or mystery novel perhaps would have. The fear that it triggered in me was more self-preserving, and defensive. I wasn’t driven to run away from the dark or fear opening my closet at night, it was a fear established in the everyday faces that you cross without a second glance. Who is your neighbor? How much do you know about them? And so we come to the type of fear; paranoia, the most harmful psychologically in my opinion.
The Lovely Bones was only about 265 pages long, but it took me two whole weeks to read it. It was dense, and the intensity of the tale within it was very hard to read quickly. It forces you to invest and connect with every member of the family as they go through the stages of grief. They varied in how they expressed the stages, but you could see them all nonetheless.
While the movie cuts back on the details of almost…well, everything, the book on the other hand goes into great detail to connect the reader to the characters. The younger sister is forced to grow up faster, and she struggles to surpass the shadow of a dead older sister. The toddler was forced to grow up in a broken family and haunted by the memory of someone he barely knew. The father, who constantly refused to give up on his little girl. The mother shut down and sought refuge by running away from her life and seeking escape from her actions.
The movie holds back the depth and darkness that is found in the novel and does not do it justice. While the film focuses more on Susie and her experience from heaven as she watches her family and her killer, the book focuses on the family, and how they each struggle to move forward, or how hard they try to not be dragged back by a memory. The Lovely Bones gave me chills, goosebumps, tears, and even laughter. It reflected life, and therefore death, and how the line between them might not be as clear as we wished it to be. I give this book a 5 out of 5.
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