Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones starts out by saying “ My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” The book is narrated by an average teenage girl who was viciously raped and murdered by her next door neighbor. After her dealth is confirmed, Susie’s family struggles to cope with the loss of their fourteen year old daughter and sister and all of the unanswered questions about her dealth. Both of Susie’s parents are incapable of confronting the tragedy. Her sister, Lindsey, deals with her grief privately and in her own way. Buckley, the youngest Salmon child, only four, is still uncertain and unclear about what is really happening and spends most of his time with the family of a neighborhood friend. Mr. Harvey lures Susie into a hole in the middle of a cornfield. After raping and than killing her, he stuffs her body into a platic bag and puts her into a safe and dumps it into the towns sink hole. Susie believes she is stuck, in what she believes, is the in between of heaven and earth. There, she sits in the gazebo and watches her friends and family as her dad moves closer and closer to the man that killed his daughter.
Susie’s dad see’s Mr.
Harvey outside building a tent and offers to help. While talking to him, he suspects that Mr. Harvey knows a little more about his daughters murder that what he says. Lindsey also starts to become suspicious of Mr. Harvey and breaks into his house and finds a journal in which their was a drawing of the hole where he killed Susie. Mr. Harvey comes home while Lindsey is still in the house and she almost didn’t escape through the upstairs window. Later that night, Mr. Harvey leaves town and Len Lenermen realizes he missed his chance to catch him. In other states, clues begin to appear that link Mr. Harvey to other
murders. A little over five years after the dealth of Susie, her father has a heart attack, her mom moves back in with her dad after she moved to California, Lindey gets married and has a baby that she named after her sister, and the family has finally found peace and they openly talk about Susie whenever she comes to mind. While watching her family, Susie is gratful for the relationsips that grew up in her absence, she refers to these as the lovely bones. With this, she decides she is done watching the living and knows that she and her family can move on. After she leaves, she goes to a new heaven that is much larger her old one that has things that she has never dreamed of in it. There, she watches her murderer fall into a revine and die, he was never accused of the rap and murder of Susie Salmon. Susie knows she never really grew up, but she feels like she has.