The Lovely Bones

As I said yesterday, I'm going to post my partial review of the book 'The Lovely Bones' by Alice Sebold.

First off, there are some amazing points to say about the book. The whole idea of Heaven there is amazing. It's something new, something I haven't read before. I loved how Susie saw and did everything with her family even after death. The family was 3D and did everything you would expect of a normal family to have reacted to Susie's death. The father in particular I thought was a very rounded character.

I don't have much to say about the mother, in all honesty. I didn't like her that much, and our information on her is quite sketchy. I couldn't get a solid read on her character. Like, her affair with the police officer seemed completely unrealistic to me, and she seemed to show no ounce of remorse towards the father even when she was having the affair. She seemed really selfish to me, mainly thinking of her own needs. It never came across to me that she even thought of anyone else when she decided to leave them. She could obviously see that the father was struggling to cope, yet she did nothing? That may be my personal interpretation on it, though. Those are the only main things that came across to me about her character.

The brother and the sister, Buckley and Lindsey, I thought were well rounded characters. Very believable. They were a normal family. The sister in particular reached out to me. The way you see females in books nowadays is that they scream their emotion all the time. But she didn't, which was a nice change. She was probably one of my favourite characters of the book. You could easily define her likes, dislikes. She was an easy character to imagine. The brother too. I thought his character was cute and unpredicted.

The grandmother was also a nice character. I viewed her as the character who liked to lighten the mood, and that's exactly what she did. Though she had her serious moments too, which were also very sweet. I liked her a lot.

George Harvey. He just screamed CHILD MOLESTER. Did anyone else pick up on that? Probably. I did not like him, as was probably intended. I thought he was an interesting character though...

Some of the things I didn't get:

1) The relationship between Abigail and Len, that seemed quite left out. It was happening one moment, then not the other. It was kinda sweeped under the carpet for no reason. Nothing ever came of it, can someone explain this to me? I know it was because she missed Susie, and it was a way for her to deal with her guilt. But could the same thing be said about him? That one I did not know. And if he loved her so much, why did nothing ever come of it? As I said, it was just kinda sweeped under the carpet.

2) George Harvey. His reasoning for somethings I didn't quite get. Nothing ever came of some of the things that he did. And I was holding on to the naive thought that something might happen to him in the end, well besides death. That he was caught out. Susie's bones discovered, anything. I was holding on to a childlike naiveness about that one. But that's not exactly something I didn't like about the story, as I can see it was mainly focusing on her family, and her family coping with her death.

3) Grammar. It might just have been my eBook copy, but there were some typos and grammar mistakes there. I know I'm no goddess when it comes to grammar and spelling. You only need to look at this page to know that. But when I read a book (other than Twilight where bad grammar is a known fact) I expect the grammar and story telling to be a bit more sound. You know what I mean? I thought it fell flat here. I'm not misjudging her story telling ability. I think it's a great story idea. It was just some little things that held her back in the end.

Those were my main problems really.
Overall I would say that the book is a decent one. A great story line, it just falls flat in some places. But no book is perfect. I understand that. I would rate the book as maybe a 6/10. I'd recommend the book to people, just warn them that it might not live up to their high expectations....