OUTSIDE READING #7

In between cooking holiday dishes, wrapping presents and opening presents I didn’t have much time to read. But even with my busy schedule I managed to finish The Lovely Bones. I was so enthusiastic about finishing that I snuck away from my family and read the last few chapters. I don’t regret hiding from family for a few hours at all because the ending was phenomenal! I won’t spoil the conclusion for any readers, but I will say it is not how I would have expected it to be. It is definitely not like most endings. Unlike one final event to close the story, Alice Sebold slowly comes to an end by expressing a few final events that let the reader better understand the character’s lives and ultimately, I think, end the story more successfully.
One passage I thought wrapped up the book is spoken by Susie a few pages before the actually ending of the book. Susie is watching her family, from “her heaven”, while they drink champagne and celebrate Lindsey (Susie’s sister) and Sam’s (Lindsey steady boyfriend since Susie’s death) engagement.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the
connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great costs, but often
magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way
that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought
were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable
time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had
been my life.” (320)

Susie, while watching her family, realizes that her death, while a bug part of her family’s life, is not the only drastic event that occupies all their attention and emotions. To me this passage is the ending of Susie’s story and the beginning of her family’s.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that loves a good mix of mystery, romance, suspense and horror in the books they read. The story, at some points can be a bit strange and hard to relate to but overall the book is awesome—a must read.