The Lovely Bones
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The Lovely Bones (2002), by Alice Sebold, is a novel told in the first person by Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered in the first chapter. Over the next few years, from a personalized heaven that takes the form of a high school she never lived to attend and its suburban surroundings, she watches her family and friends deal with their grief, her killer escape justice and go on to kill again and tries to reach a sense of closure herself, with the help of others she becomes acquainted. Susie can, when she looks down on Earth, see anything and follow thoughts, even see into her killer’s past, but has only minimal impact on events. Sometimes members of her family on Earth can see her very briefly.
While the novel follows a generally linear plot, there are frequent digressions as Susie sometimes gets ahead of or behind herself.
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Plot summary
The novel begins with an anecdote, used as an epigraph, in which Susie recalls her father amusing her as a child by shaking a snow dome with a small penguin inside all by himself. She expresses concern for the penguin. "Don't worry, Susie," he says, "He's got a nice life. He's trapped inside a perfect world."
In the opening sentences, Susie introduces herself to us and takes us to the date of her death, December 6, 1973, "before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons and in the daily mail ... when people believed things like that didn't happen."
At dusk, with a light snow falling, she takes a shortcut back home across a small cornfield from her junior high school to her home in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. When she stops to taste a snowflake, she is accosted by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-thirties who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. Once she enters, he rapes and strangles her, cutting her body into parts to make it easier to carry, and then collapses the den. An elbow, the only part of Susie ever to be found, falls out of his bag as he returns home.
Susie tells us later that she missed all this as her spirit was fleeing toward heaven. On the way there, she reaches out and brushes Ruth Connors, a classmate who is walking near the school while Susie is being killed. Ruth dreams about the incident that night, and will become increasingly fascinated with not just Susie, but murdered women as a whole, over the next few years. Over this time, she also becomes close friends with Ray Singh, a British immigrant of Indian descent who had given Susie her first kiss a few days before her death.
She arrives in heaven to at first find it boring, saying "life here is a perpetual yesterday." She and a fellow teen girl, an Asian-American named Holly, are finally approached by a friendly older woman named Franny, who describes herself as their intake counselor. She explains that anything they desire can be theirs if they follow the paths that wind and twist through the woods and wish for it. Following this advice, Susie and Holly find their way to a duplex where they live, a gazebo from which they often follow events on Earth, and an ice cream stand where they can get peppermint-stick ice cream all year long. At the high school, there are no teachers and they only have to attend one class each. "The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."
They also meet other inhabitants of what they realize is "their" heaven; one of which is an older woman, a past neighbor of the Salmons who was the only dead body Susie had ever seen during her life. At night Holly and the woman play duets on violin and saxophone which attract many dogs, consoling Susie, who misses her own dog Holiday.
On Earth, Mr. Harvey disposes of the remaining parts of Susie's body by putting them in a safe and paying someone to drop it in a sinkhole. He successfully destroys most other evidence save a charm bracelet, which he tosses in an unfilled pond in an office park under construction.
The Salmon family is at first reluctant to accept the police conclusion that Susie has been killed, but then accedes to it when Susie's hat and elbow are found. The police who talk to Mr. Harvey find him odd but see no reason to suspect him; Jack, Susie's father, even goes over to his house and builds a tent with him. He becomes suspicious of him and later comes to annoy the police with his constant tips about Harvey. Susie's sister Lindsey, considered by both her family and the school to be the smarter of the two girls in her family, later comes to share those suspicions.
Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work, increasingly isolating himself at home and annoying the police with tips on Mr. Harvey. Lindsey, along with Ruth, attends a summer camp for the gifted and talented, where she loses her virginity to Samuel Heckler, a classmate who had brought her a Christmas gift after her sister's death. Buckley, the youngest child in the family at five, tries to make sense of all this as he starts school.
Back in heaven, Susie realizes that her heaven is only a stop on the way to a larger, more permanent heaven, and asks Franny what she has to do to get there. "You have to stop desiring certain answers," she answers. "Simply put, you have to give up on Earth." Susie admits she is as yet unable to do this.
One day late in the summer Detective Len Fenerman comes to tell the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night, in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it to be Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him with a baseball bat. It turns out to be Susie's best friend, Clarissa, and her boyfriend Brian looking for a place to make out. Brian and Jack struggle for a while before this straightens itself out, and Jack is struck with the bat and has to have knee replacement surgery.
In the wake of this, his wife Abigail, whose pregnancy with Susie had forced their marriage and the cancellation of her plans to go study in France, begins having an affair with Fenerman, a widower.
Amidst all this, Abigail's mother, Grandma Lynn, comes to stay with the Salmons for a while, providing much-needed support. She senses her daughter's affair and tells her to stop it.
Jack and Lindsey between them hatch a plan in which Lindsey will sneak into Mr. Harvey's house during soccer practice and possibly find any evidence within that would link Mr. Harvey to the murder. She finds a drawing of the pit and is forced to leave when Mr. Harvey returns prematurely. Mr. Harvey manages to explain it to the police as his own attempt to solve the murder but realizes afterwards that he must leave Norristown as soon as possible.
Susie, watching this from afar, begins to understand that she was not Mr. Harvey's first victim (something she has already explained to the reader) and that he is a serial killer who has killed women young and old going as far back as 1959. As Lindsey explores Mr. Harvey's basement, the names and deaths of his other victims become known to Susie.
Afterwards, back in heaven, Franny gives Susie a map to a cornfield which disappears as soon as a small path appears. Susie follows it to a tree where she meets Mr. Harvey's other victims. She looks into Mr. Harvey's past and sees a small boy whose mother was an incorrigible kleptomaniac who stole from dead bodies and ultimately abandoned him. He learned one night when three men came to rape her and she ran them over with a car that children and women were "the two worst things to be."
On the first anniversary of Susie's death, the neighbors and almost all the main characters gather in an impromptu ceremony in the cornfield to light candles and sing old Irish ballads in her memory. Jack will organize these every year, though fewer and fewer people attend.
In the wake of Lindsey's breaking in to Mr. Harvey's house, Abigail consummates her affair with Detective Fenerman, rendezvousing with him in a Spencer's gift shop at the local mall. While this takes place, Mr. Harvey leaves his house and Norristown and drops out of all sight save Susie's, becoming a drifter who continues to kill other young women despite all his efforts to reform. Fenerman is later consumed by guilt that he allowed Harvey to get away.
The following summer Abigail finally leaves her husband, going to her father's old cabin in New Hampshire. As a result, Grandma Lynn moves into the Salmons' home for good to help her son-in-law care for Buckley and Lindsey.
A year later the police are able to bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a soda bottle from the night of the murder with Mr. Harvey's and Susie's fingerprints, finally making him an official suspect. However, he remains at large.
In 1976, Abigail leaves New Hampshire for a cross-country trip, eventually reaching California where she finally settles, taking a job at a winery. That fall, a hunter in Connecticut discovers the body of another one of Harvey's victims, and one of Susie's charms nearby — the first clue since her murder.
The following year, Susie's class graduates. Ruth skips the ceremony and moves to the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she takes a low-paying position as a waitress and continues to look for the sites of other murdered women around New York. Unbeknownst to her, she has become quite a celebrity in heaven.
Ray has already been admitted to Penn a year early, and is beginning premedical studies, where he becomes curious about life-after-death experiences from his friendship with Ruth.
In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. A biker friend of Samuel's older brother Hal provides information that links Harvey to the murder of his own mother. Police now realize they were dealing with a serial killer, but cannot find him, as he has been "living wild within the Northeast Corridor."
Holiday finally dies and is reunited with an ecstatic Susie in heaven.
Shortly after their own graduations, Samuel and Lindsey become engaged, find an old house in the woods that Ruth's father owns and decide to fix it up and live there. The Salmons celebrate the first good thing to happen to them since Susie's death with a bottle of champagne, and during the ensuing party Buckley briefly sees Susie. Lindsey later decides to become a therapist.
Some time thereafter, Buckley discovers a box of Susie's old clothes and decides to use some of them to help stake the tomatoes in his garden. His father, upon seeing this, objects vehemently, provoking an argument between him and his on which brings on a heart attack.
Susie is torn as her father lies in a hospital bed. She wants him to be with her, but knows also that if he dies it will be all the worse for Buckley. That night in heaven, the paths in front of her suddenly begin to fork and branch and lead her further and further from where she has usually been. "I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed," she says.
That something turns out to be not her father, but her grandfather, and the two briefly dance to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings before he tells her he has to go, saying "Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close."
Jack's emergency prompts Abigail to return from California. The reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness at her for having abandoned him and his father.
Unbeknownst to either of them, shortly thereafter Ruth and Mr. Harvey return to Norristown, which has gotten more built-up, as Ruth and Ray observe as they walk together out to the sinkhole where Susie's body is buried. Neither of them know this, but Susie is still very much on their minds and conversations.
Ruth senses Susie's presence as Ray explores a nearby house that is soon to be demolished. Then it vanishes. However, shortly thereafter Mr. Harvey, having explored his old neighborhood and seen that the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he killed Susie, drives by the sinkhole and Ruth can sense the women he has killed. She is overcome, as is Susie watching from heaven, and they exchange positions.
Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, kisses Ray and starts making out with him. He begins to sense that something has come over Ruth when she says "Everytime you kiss me I see heaven." He asks what it's like, and she says she'll tell him if he makes love to her. He asks who she is.
They go to Hal Heckler's nearby bike shop, which is closed. Susie-as-Ruth again amazes Ray by finding the hidden key. When she asks to take a shower first, Ray calls her Susie and she doesn't challenge him. She reminds him of a note he wrote Susie back in junior high school and fulfills her end of the bargain, telling him what heaven is like.
Afterwards, she feels herself weaken and realizes she will be returning to heaven soon. She asks Ray if he ever thinks about the dead. "We're here, you know," she tells him. "All the time. You can talk to us or think about us. It doesn't have to be sad or scary."
She leaves Ruth's body again as she sees some sort of apparition forming at the edge of the bed, although she can still talk to him. She tells him to read Ruth's journals. She tries to call her house and say hi to her brother, and he answers, but she no longer has the power to speak. She sees other spirits around the grayish mass at the foot of the bed, and realizes it is time for her to go once again.
She continues to watch from heaven as her mother at long last returns home when her father is discharged from the hospital. "I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I was waiting for," she muses, "for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone."
In the final chapter, Susie has moved on to "the place I call this wide wide Heaven," which "is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wild roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams." Several years later, she also tells us, Grandma Lynn has died but Susie has not yet met her yet.
She still watches earthbound events from time to time, and one day with her grandfather she spies Mr. Harvey getting off a Greyhound bus at a diner in New Hampshire in early spring. Behind the diner he sees another young woman and tries to chat her up with the intention of killing her, but she rebuffs him. Susie notices some large icicles hanging from the roof, and after the woman leaves one falls and hits Mr. Harvey on the head, knocking him into a nearby ravine and ultimately killing him.
The novel ends with Susie showing us Lindsey's newborn daughter, then tracking away to a newer house where a man has finally found Susie's old charm bracelet. "This little girl's grown up by now," his wife says.
"Almost. Not quite," Susie's narrative voice rejoins. "I wish you all a long and happy life."
Title
- "These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life." – Susie on page 320.
Origins
During her freshman year at Syracuse University, Sebold was raped. In Lucky, her 1997 memoir of that event and its aftermath, she describes how a police officer told her the rapist's previous victim had died. She also saw the rapist on the street later and reported him to the police. Eventually she testified against him at trial, and he was convicted and received the maximum sentence.
She began the novel in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of those events. However, she fiercely resists (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,778873,00.html) any suggestion that it had anything to do with the aftermath of the rape:
- First of all, therapy is for therapy. Leave it there. Second, because you're a rape victim, everyone wants to turn everything you do into something "therapeutic"
- — oh, I understand, going to the bathroom must be so therapeutic for you!
In an afterword to the paperback edition, she says (http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/lovely_bones2.asp#interview) "the oddness of what we often condescendingly refer to as the suburbs" (she lived outside of Philadelphia herself for a time) was also an inspiration.
Characters
- Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered in the first chapter, and narrates the novel from heaven.
- Jack Salmon, her father, who works for an insurance agency in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
- Abigail Salmon, her mother, whose growing family frustrated her youthful dreams.
- Lindsey Salmon, Susie's sister, a year younger than her, thought of as the smartest child in the family. She is the only Salmon child whose birth was planned.
- Buckley Salmon, Susie's brother, ten years her junior. His unplanned birth forced Abigail to cancel her plans for a teaching career. He sometimes sees Susie while she watches him.
- Grandma Lynn, Abigail's mother, who comes to live with her son-in-law and grandchildren after her daughter leaves.
- George Harvey, the Salmons' neighbor, who kills Susie and goes unpunished even though the Salmons come to suspect him, then leaves Norristown to kill again. Throughout the novel she refers to him as Mr. Harvey.
- Ruth Connor, a classmate of Susie's whom her dead spirit touches as she leaves the earth. She becomes fascinated with Susie despite barely having known her in her life, and devotes her life to writing about the visions of the dead she sees.
- Ray Singh, the first and only boy to kiss Susie and later Ruth's friend.
- Sam Heckler, Lindsey's boyfriend and later her husband.
- Hal Heckler, Sam's older brother who runs a motorcycle repair shop.
- Len Fenerman, the police detective in charge of investigating Susie's death, who later has an affair with Abigail.
- Holly, Susie's best friend in heaven.
- Franny, Susie and Holly's "intake counselor" in heaven.
- Holiday, Susie's dog.
Themes and literary techniques
Much of the novel concerns itself with grief and how it is, or is not, overcome, by Susie and her family. It is similar in many ways to Judith Guest’s Ordinary People, which also concerns a suburban family in the mid-1970s trying to cope with the sudden death of its eldest teenaged child.
The disintegration of the suburban nuclear family during the 1970s is also present, as Susie's death precipitates a chain of events which ultimately results in Abigail, feeling more and more trapped by her domestic responsibilities, leaving her husband. By the end of the novel, Ray's mother Ruane also decides to leave her marriage.
In this respect it is similar not only to Ordinary People but to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, which is set around the same time The Lovely Bones begins and ends with the tragic death of a family's teenage child. In contrast to that novel, however, references and pop-culture allusions to the era are minimal (Watergate, which was unfolding in more and more grim detail in late 1973 and makes a significant part of the background of Moody's work, is never even once mentioned in The Lovely Bones). Sebold chose the earlier time period because media frenzies did not routinely surround the families of missing children then (as she has Susie point out); it also helps explain why the police are not able to catch Mr. Harvey since forensics were less advanced back then.
Another underlying theme is the increasing development of the suburban Northeast. Many locations are built on over the course of the novel ... Mr. Harvey disposes of Susie's effects at office park construction sites, the field where she was murdered eventually becomes the site of a new wing of her school and Ray laments to Ruth shortly before Susie inhabits her that every year Norristown is beginning to look more and more like everywhere else. For them, Susie's memory becomes a way of recalling the larger past. Sebold herself said (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,778873,00.html) of this:
- That was when suburban developments were new - a time before media saturation, chain stores, malls, the internet, homogenised places. What it's meant is that everyone's become more detached from other human beings, sitting in their car or at their computer.
At bottom, the novel is a classic Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, about how Susie manages to grow up despite her life being cut so short. The change in Susie's voice and perspective from the beginning to the end is subtle yet unmistakeable.
Symbols and motifs
Flowers are often seen in the novel, and unsurprisingly represent the dead's 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.
The ships Jack puts in bottles as a hobby also come to represent Susie to him, who like the penguin in the anecdote that serves as the novel's epigraph she, too, is trapped in a perfect world. Neither of her siblings is ever satisfactorily able to replace Susie as her father's assistant, and eventually he builds a wooden stand for the job. This also finds an echo in Mr. Harvey's dollhouses, and the way he confines her earthly remains to a safe.
The narrative focuses on small household objects a lot. Susie describes how her family members surreptitiously remove many of her personal effects from her room as her own; the charms from her bracelet help link Mr. Harvey to other murders.
Photography is important, too, particularly a picture Susie took of her mother unawares one morning with her Kodak Instamatic, which she later realizes was the only time she saw her mother as a woman and not just her mother. Some time after Abigail leaves her father finds it accidentally and it reminds him of how much he still loves her. Susie wants to be a wildlife photographer when she grows up, and one late chapter is called "Snapshots" instead of being numbered.
Susie's charm bracelet, which she prays will be found and possibly lead investigators to Mr. Harvey, could be read as an Althusserian "final signifier" — when its lonely hour arrives at the very end of the novel, it can no longer have any impact on its events.
Omniscient narrator
The Lovely Bones was notable when it was published for its use of an omniscient narrator, a device thought by some to be dead in most contemporary American fiction. Susie, however, complicates this by also being a character in the story, albeit one pushed to the sidelines by events.
Still, she controls the narrative flow and often talks to the reader directly, acknowledging that it is a story being told in a book ("Don't think that every person you meet in here is a suspect," she says in the opening paragraphs). In this respect she bears a lot of similarity to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a play explicitly alluded to in the novel which also, in its last act, features a young woman reviewing her small-town life posthumously.
Commercial and critical reception
Sebold's novel was the surprise of the American publishing world in 2002. Unheralded, by a younger author known only for one other book, and not widely outside of literary circles, with a plot and narrative device that many publishers admitted they would have passed on without actually reading had it been described to them, it would have been considered a success by Little, Brown had it sold 20,000 copies. It wound up selling over a million and remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year.
Some of that could have been attributed to adroit marketing. Prior to its June publication, an excerpt was run in Seventeen. Shortly afterwards, ABC's Good Morning America chose it for its book club. Then the book became popular summer reading and a runaway success, with much of its sales subsequently attributed to word of mouth.
It has been suggested that a story of grief and recovery as it affects not only those left behind but the dead person herself struck just the right note for a nation dealing with the aftermath of 9/11. Current events also benefited the book when the media became captivated by the abduction drama surrounding a Utah teen, Elizabeth Smart (later found alive), and a similar story from Oregon of a man who was found to have buried two local teen girls under a concrete plug in his backyard several years before.
Critics, too, helped by being generally kind, many noting that the story had much more promise than the idea of a brutally murdered teenage girl going to heaven and following her family and friends as they get on with their lives would have suggested. "This is a high-wire act for a first novelist," wrote (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE7D71031F937A25754C0A9649C8B63) Katherine Bouton in the New York Times Book Review, "and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance."
Most also agreed with her, though, that the climactic scene where Susie inhabits Ruth's body didn't quite work. Some pointed out that the 1991 movie Ghost has a similar scene. Nevertheless, it turned up on many ten-best lists at the end of the year.
The novel also sold well in other English-speaking countries, but critics there were a bit more restrained. While admitting the novel "has its very fine moments," The Guardian's Ali Smith ultimately said (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,775873,00.html) "The Lovely Bones is so keen in the end to comfort us and make safe its world that, however well-meaning, it avoids its own ramifications." Her Observer colleague Philip Hensher was blunter, conceding (http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,772411,00.html) that the novel was "very readable" but "ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy."
The novel has begun to be assigned in many secondary-school English classes, despite the complexity of its storyline and grimness of its subject matter, because it has a teenage protagonist. In 2003, Gary Soto published The Afterlife, a young-adult novel that bears some striking similarities — a male protagonist hangs around the world after his murder, watches himself mourned and missed, and then gradually finds his way to heaven.
It also remains popular with reading groups.
Controversies
Besides the climatic scene with Susie possessing Ruth, there exist some other points of debate about the novel.
Interestingly, readers who took a Christian perspective faulted Susie's heaven for being utterly devoid of any apparent religious aspect ("It's a very God-free heaven, with no suggestion that anyone has been judged, or found wanting," Hensher groused); while others from a secular background found the very idea of heaven inherently religious.
Does Susie eventually avenge her death at Mr. Harvey's hands, as she wishes to at one point early in the story? While she doesn't say explicitly that she dislodged the icicle, she makes a point of pointing them out to the reader right before it falls. The reader has seen earlier that she can do minor things on earth like blow candles out, and that the dead "do things that leave humans stumped and grateful." Also earlier in the novel, she tells us she had chosen an ice weapon as the tool for the perfect murder during contests in heaven to pick one.
Some readers say that it makes Susie seem less sympathetic, even if Mr. Harvey has escaped justice.
Also, while there several references in the book that suggest Ruth is a lesbian, it is never stated explicitly that she is.
Film version
The story of the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones is rather complex. Most studios passed on the novel before it became a bestseller, finding its premise doubtful and unlikely to make for a commercially hot property.
But two producers, Aimée Peyronnet and James Wilson, at the British studio Film Four, saw potential, and bought the rights for what Sebold described as a figure so low that her agent got up and walked around the room when she told him.
Sales figures proved them correct, and by early 2003 Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay was writing the screenplay, reportedly excited to be making her American debut.
However, Film Four soon encountered financial difficulties which left it nearly bankrupt. The rights to Bones were obviously a way out of this, and they ended up in the hands of Peter Jackson, fresh from his Lord of the Rings success, by the end of the year. Sometime early in 2004, Ramsay either left the project or was eased out, depending on who told the story, clearing the way for Jackson to direct the film himself. (A year after that, she said (http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1405345,00.html) simply that "it was also such a well-loved book that I didn't want everyone talking about the difference between the book and the film."
There were rumors that Steven Spielberg, whose DreamWorks studio was initially involved, had orchestrated this turn of events as a way to eventually land the project himself, since it was well-known that Jackson had committed to the remake of King Kong, not set to start filming until that September, and he might well change his mind in the meantime and find another project.
However, Jackson took personal possession of the rights and said he would indeed make the film, that in fact he would be looking forward to doing a smaller, more intimate film after the epics of Rings and Kong and it would mark a return to territory he had previously explored in Heavenly Creatures. He is currently working on the script with his regular collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (Wilson and Peyronnet are still listed as producers); the film is not expected to be released until 2007. They have decided not to accept any studio financing until the script is complete.
Trivia
Fairfax Junior High School was inspired by Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, which Sebold attended for a while.
The quotation Susie has written in her notebook at the beginning of the novel ("If they give you ruled paper to write on, write the other way," by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez), which she credits Lindsey for turning her attention to, is also the epigraph to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, commonly found in many school libraries.
External links
- The Lovely Bones Reading Group Guide (http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/lovely_bones1.asp)
- The Lovely Bones (http://www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0380510/) at the Internet Movie Database
- Hypothetical casting (http://imaginecasting.com/imagine/topPicks.php?Movie_ID=585) for the film.
- A Dark First Novel Suddenly Soars to the Top (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E15F835590C728EDDA90994DA404482&incamp=archive:search) in The New York Times
