Tuesday, February 02, 2010

The Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

It's not much a secret that I'm a big sap when it comes to sad movies and sad books. I will cry. In public. (I think this makes up for otherwise evil, apathetic soul - it's all about balance, you know?) So, given the subject matter (girl dies at hands of horrible sociopath, spends afterlife watching her loved ones cope), it comes as no surprise that I was a complete wreck while reading Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. So much so, that I stopped carrying it around with me, as It only lead to me swallowing tears and blaming red eyes on allergies. Embarrassing really.

Enough about me.

Can I just say that I thought this book is simply beautiful. The descriptions and dialogue are marvellous. And Sebold's imagining of the afterlife is just… spot-on. It could have been so schmaltzy, with the perfect Heaven and the following of loved ones, yadda yadda. Amazingly, it isn't. The perfect Heaven isn't perfect and (paradoxically), that's what makes it perfect. 14-year-old Susie Salmon seems to be written with the perfect blend of first-person candour and third-person omniscience. Just as she gets to know everything there is to know about life, something small will happen (a dance, perhaps) that brings us back to the girl whose life ends far too abruptly. And really, that's where the beauty comes in: this book is peppered with some of the most heart-wrenching vignettes I've read in print (making ships in a bottle, a screaming match between teenager and mother, building a fort in the backyard).

Aside from the almost poetic reading of the novel, comes the fact of how close to home this all hits. I think anyone who lived through the trials of Bernardo and Homolka would have a hard time not imagining Kristen and Leslie in a situation just like this, or maybe, even, as one of girls in a bloody dress. Read it. Read it. Read it. I can't begin to tell you how good this book really is.

No comments: