(This is a very rough draft, so there is much editing to be done)
(Also, there is mention of violence, murder, rape, and spoilers in this review, so you are forewarned)
(This book also contains adult situations, language, and other situations everyone might not enjoy reading about)
The book is called The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. The main character in this book is Susie Salmon who was murdered on December 6, 1973. She was 14 years old. She was coming home from school when a neighbor asked her if she wanted to see what he built in his cornfield. She thought it would be ok because she had seen her Dad talking to him before. He had built an underground bunker of sorts. When she goes down there, she doesn't feel easy but he was showing her. He rapes her and cuts her in pieces. He puts her in a cloth bag and takes her mutilated body back to his house. When she dies she feels her spirit rising up to Heaven, but on her way, she accidentally touched a girl that was near the school, who's name is Routh. She realizes that she is in Heaven, but then realizes that's the in-between. She meets people there that she doesn't actually know and remembers a gazebo a neighbor had built and wishes for a gazebo in her world. Everyday, she looks over the edge of the gazebo and watches her family below and tries to contact them. The family soon realizes that the girl is missing and another neighbor's dog finds her elbow which leads to finding very much blood in the corn field where she was murdered. Since there is no solid evidence, the police cannot do anything to help. Each member of the family takes the murder differently. The father tries to find the murderer and such... Susie watches over her family from her Heaven and also keeps an eye on her murderer and learns that she is not the only one that he's murdered. Susie's sister, Lindsey, talks about going into the suspected murderer's house and tries to find anything that will help with the murder of her sister. She kicks out the basement window and sees a sketch book of houses and beams and such. She sees the picture of the underground hideout in the cornstalk field. She doesn't hear him coming home, she tears out the piece of paper and manages to get out through the window. The neighbor remembers Lindsie's jacket number and calls the cops on her, but acts calm. Later, he packs up and leaves without a trace. About ten years later, her sister Lindsie comes home when her father has a stroke. Routh, an unpopular artist, touched Susie's spirit as she went to heaven and finds that she can see dead people and understand their death. She kept books of Susie's death. One day Routh gets a letter from her Dad that there is a sinkhole and they decide to check it out. Mr. Harvey, Susie's murderer, travels around undercover to stay under the radar. He gained a lust for killing from a young age and tries to curb his appetite but he soon gets too hungry to bear. As he follows a young girl, he is impaled by an icicle and dies. Susie is trying to cope with being in her heaven because she is stuck in the in-between due to her want for worldly things. Routh goes to the sinkhole and spots a beat up vehicle and recognizes that it's Mr. Harvey's. She faints immediately and when she wakes up, she is Susie (Routh is a kind of an in-between for Susie and the real world). She disliked the book because there was no closure for the book and many more questions were left unanswered than were answers. You would think that Susie was going to get some kind of closure by having her body discovered by her parents or such. All that happened was that Susie got to go back and spend time with Ray (the person who had a crush on her). The story ends as Lindsie gets married and the family working out their differences. All of Susie's simple desires were granted to her in her in-between Heaven. The story is basically about a family moving on after the death of a child or sister and that it is difficult in the way that each family member copes with the loss. Also, she doesn't care if it was on the number one national best seller and hopes that the movie is different from the book (basically she said the book ending sucked and it kinda ruined the other parts of the book).
