I cannot count how many times I had to look away from the page I was on, drawing in breath sharply as Susie’s pain and the pain of her family and friends burned into me. Alice Sebold‘s prose is powerful; if you’re not careful, The Lovely Bones will knock you flat on your back.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

There were parts where I could not bear to mark the page and put the book down, which led to me spending a couple of nights reading until four in the morning. I greedily took in page after page, desperate to know whether Susie’s killer would be caught or if her body would be found.

However, there were also long stretches of nearly nothing happening, contributing to making this novel hard to read. While Susie’s thoughts about her heaven and the trains she rode on Earth and the Evensong were interesting, there was little action during these parts. It was during these stretches that I would mark my place and go back to work or whatever I was doing before the siren call of the book made me pick it up.

There were a few things that really jumped out at me throughout reading, and I’d like to share them with you.

On page 249, Ruth writes in her journal that “booze affects material as it does people,” after observing that alcohol stained her black clothing an even deeper black. I thought this was an incredibly interesting perception, adding even more depth to the novel itself and to Ruth’s character.

I liked how Sebold tied together Susie’s and Lindsey’s childhood game of knight and widow with the dynamics of the relationship between Susie’s parents. Susie muses over Lindsey’s favorite line from their game — “How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?” — on page 276.

I did not like Ruth’s out-of-body experience and temporary trade with Susie. I thought it added an ethereal feel to a novel that had, up until then, been mostly rooted outside of fantasy and focused more on what happened to a family after the loss of a child.

I was not at all impressed with the ending. In fact, I was very disappointed by it. I felt that I had stuck with the book through some very painful parts, and that it was a miracle that I had been able to get through those parts. I thought that I deserved a much better conclusion for being so loyal through such grievous subject matter. Susie’s subtle revenge and the final lines of the novel itself were highly anticlimactic for a novel that — for the most part — kept me turning page after page.

Still, it was a great book. Sebold is an amazing writer, evoking your emotions even if you haven’t experienced losing a child. The Lovely Bones is actually Sebold’s first novel, which is surprising because I would have thought — from the expertly paramount writing — that she had written dozens before sitting down to make The Lovely Bones come to life.