"The Lovely Bones" clarification essay.

Essay by ktizzle4rizzle January 2006

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Before reading this book I thought it was going to be horrible. The plot sounds some what gruesome, a young girl narrator her rape and death at the hands of a sexual predator, which is also one of her neighbors. From heaven she watches her family fall apart after her death, and then eventually come back together. Alice Sebold has a wonderful way of writing her book to the point where you have to know what's happening next. Yet I didn't find the book to be overly depressing and I thought Sebold chose her words beautifully. Sebold spoke very vaguely about what heaven was like. Apparently from her point of view everyone gets their own heaven. Susie Salmon, the main character, had a heaven that looked like her small suburb. In her heaven she had a counselor and she met a girl right away. As some time passed she met women that were also victims of the same killer.

Not exactly the heavenly bliss she was hoping for. Susie enjoyed tracking down not only her family but her classmates also, like ray, the boy that she almost kissed. Also Ruth, the girl she almost became friends with. Ruth could some how sense dead people and became something like a medium. In this book there are many symbols that people will think represent themselves and well as the characters

Flowers are often seen in the novel, and unsurprisingly represent the deads continued presence in the lives of the living. Susie's favorite flower, we learn, is the daffodil, and accordingly they are left on the site of her death at its anniversary. Later, she and her fellow dead make Buckley's garden come up with a wild mix of geraniums.