The Lovely Bones by
Alice Sebold is a story centering around a fourteen-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered near her home in the 1970s. She narrates the story after death, as she watches over her family and keeps tabs on her killer from her heaven. She follows each of her family members as they deal with her death, each in very different ways. She follows Ruth, a classmate who felt her presence as she passed through a parking lot from this world to the next and whose life is never the same from that moment on. She follows Ray Singh, another classmate who was in love with her - her almost and only romance. And she follows the man who took her life.
Rape is difficult for me to read, and it's even more awful to me in this book because of Susie's young age and the gruesome way in which she dies afterward. Sebold treats this delicate subject matter well, though; perhaps because she herself was a victim of rape. The scene isn't drawn out, and we get only those details which are vital to the understanding of the story. So to anyone wary of picking this up because of this topic, I would at least give it a go, because the reading of it isn't as bad as I anticipated. Of course, you may end up not being able to get through it, but trust me - at least try, because it's really an extraordinary book.
