The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Lovely Bones got off to a good start. It’s certainly built around an original idea – a girl narrating, from heaven, the aftermath of her own murder. Unfortunately, after the initial burst of energy died down, it got a little old. There was no pacing, no startling events, just a slow meander down the unhappy river of life with our narrator not even participating, only observing.
Then, near the end, Sebold suddenly throws a further bit of supernaturalism at us. Now, I know the book is supernatural to begin with and I don’t expect authors to operate within the realms of our reality, but I do expect them to operate within the realms of the reality they’ve defined, and this incident is not set up by the prior text. It’s almost as if she knew that nothing much had happened in the last two hundred pages and that it was about time that something did, only she couldn’t think of what.
Overall I was disappointed, but it’s a light, pleasant read (considering the topic) and not hard to get through.