The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Drawn in by the beautiful turquoise cover, I picked up The Lovely Bones with some trepidation as to its storyline. The back cover blurb promised an affecting and emotional book about a murdered girl adjusting to her new life in heaven and the disintegration of the family she left behind. Afterlife? Heaven? That does not sound like a story I'm interested in reading. However, after picking up and rejecting several other books, I came back to The Lovely Bones and cracked it open to a random page:

"By the time the Gilbert's dog found my elbow three days later and brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it, Mr. Harvey had closed (the place I was murdered) up."

An unattached elbow? This I have to read.

The Lovely Bones is less about life after death than about the lives people continue to live after a death. The heaven that exists in the book is merely a tool, palatable to nearly all tastes, through which Ms. Sebold relates the dead girl's perspective narration on the world she no longer enjoys. It is well written, with subtle imagery, vivid emotion and language that never jarred me out of the experience. Too often, books are described as "haunting," but this one truly is -- both in the fact that it literally deals with death and the aftermath of such a tragedy and in the typical use of the word; this beautiful story returns again and again to my mind.

On a scale from "Eh" to "FANFUCKINGTASTIC!" The Lovely Bones ranks a solid "Hell yeah!" Read it if you want a fairly easy read with an intriguing plot or if you liked What Dreams May Come.