The Lovely Bones was a book that I really enjoyed reading from beginning to end. The author did a really good job of being able to tell the story of a fourteen year old girl, Susie Salmon, who was murdered. She told the story in a way that made me want to keep reading and kept me glued to the book. The story was told from Susie's perspective but since she was in heaven she was able to act like a god and be able to describe people's feelings and emotions and be able to describe their actions. She wasn't only able to tell her story but also add to it by including how her death affected the people in her life whom she was closest to and whom she loved. By Susie being in heaven watching over the Earth, she was able to express her feelings as well as being able to let the reader know about what the other people in the book were thinking and feeling. I liked how the book was easy to read and had a lot of flashbacks to memories that Susie kept in her heart.
This book made me think a lot of about life and death about how life can be taken away from you in the least expected way. In the book, Susie was raped and murdered on her way back from school and wasn't able to get back home that day, and that is just how life is. None of us really know when we will die or how and this book really says a lot about the connection between the living and the dead and how the dead can talk to us and surround us. This is mostly shown by Ruth and how she was able to sense death around her. After reading this book, it made me appreciate my family a lot more because they are here with me and they are not gone. In the book, it shows how it took a long time for the Salmon family to get over Susie's death and be able to just keep her in their memories. Until the end of the book, they were all able to be back together and act as a family again without Susie. In the book Susie says, "I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I'd been waiting for, for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone." (316) This book also emphasizes the importance of letting go and moving on, which was very important for Susie's family to do in order to act as a family again and be happy. It was not about forgetting Susie but about being able to put Susie in their memories, like Susie said in the book, where she was meant to be.
I quote from the book that I thought was very interesting was in page 212 when Susie says, "I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it." I thought this quote was really interesting because of how it said the importance of a picture and how it captures a specific moment in time that will be lost except for that picture. In this book, I felt like time and memories were really important. Time because of how it mentions how time progressed and how things changed and got better as more time passed after Susie's death, and also how Holiday and Grandma Lynn's time comes when they get really old and die. I felt like memories were really important in this book because it is basically all Susie's family had left after she was gone and that is how she always remembered them by thinking back to memories she had shared with all of them. With this said, I feel like a picture is important because it captures a specific moment in time and is able to "stop time and hold it" as well as bring back memories. Like how the first picture Susie took of her mother in the morning that brought back the memory of her taking that picture of seeing her mom as someone else.
Another quote that really stood out to me was in page 320 when Susie says, "These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections--sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent--that had happened after I was gone." I really liked this quote because in the book, Susie had to learn to let go and be able to understand that she was gone and that everyone that she cared about on Earth was beginning to move on and live their lives without her in it. Susie's parents were able to comprehend that she was never coming back home, that she was gone.
A character that really caught my attention was Mr.Harvey, not just because he was Susie's murderer but because of the way he was. He was able to pretend as if nothing ever happened after he killed someone. He was able to trick the police and come up with lies that everyone, except usually the victim's family, believed. He had set alarms for when to do things that most people did so that it looked like he was normal and he had a chair where he could sit and look out to the school and the children. He was smart and was tricky in hiding all the evidence that could link him to Susie's death, and once they found it, he was already gone and free. One quote that really stood out to me that Susie said was, " What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child." I thought it was kind of sad how lonely he was and how he had to keep killing in order for him to feel okay, and like Susie said, he tried to stop himself but he couldn't.
I have already started recommending this book to some of my friends and I think I would recommend this book mostly to girls because they could really relate to some of the things Susie talks about.
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