The Lovely Bones – Bookish Thoughts

The Lovely Bones
By Alice Sebold

Rate: 2 / 5 stars

What It’s About: A young teenage girl gets murdered in her own backyard. She watches from heaven as her friends and family struggle to live on without her.

What I Thought:

Okay, so I went into this book with some high expectations, and that might have tainted this reading experience for me. All the blurbs on the cover claimed it would be a reading experience like no other, but I just ended up bored to tears.

This book was so. Freaking. Slow. It definitely caught my attention within the first few pages with the general idea, but the pacing of this novel is really imbalanced. It took me an excruciating three months to finish it because of this. Some sections picked up with the action, but I found myself not caring about any of the characters, or the story at all. That’s not what a book’s supposed to do.

The ending is what really threw me off. The whole book has a fantasy feel with the narrator being dead and looking down from her heaven, but the last 30 pages was too much. It got weird and honestly made me uncomfortable. It shook me out of the book even further, and it took way too long for me to get past a handful of pages. The worst part, however, has got to be the epilogue. There was no wrap up to the novel! None what so ever! The guy I wanted to know most about was killed off last second in the lamest way possible.

None of the characters got any kind of closure; actually, none of the characters had any kind of growth at all. The relationships between them were shallow and incredibly uninteresting. The only exchanges that I enjoyed were between two of the “side” characters, Ruth and Ray. The reader barely gets any insight into Ruth’s life, but at the end she becomes really important for a couple of pages, (well sorta, like I said it gets weird) and then is forgotten soon after.

This review is a jumbled mess, because the book made no sense, and it was terribly formulated. The writing was actually quite nice, but that doesn’t make up for the plot or the characters or anything else that makes a good book. I’m just dumbfounded by how so many people praise this book. It’s giving me a headache to even think about.

I apologize for the disaster that is this review, but bottom line: this book isn’t worth the time. Unless you read it blank-mindedly and try not to actually think about what you’re ingesting.