By Alice Sebold
Little, Brown and Company
Hardcover, Paperback, Audio Cassette (Unabridged), Audio CD and Large Print Editions

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was murdered. Rather than that being the end of her story, however, it is only the beginning. She has gone to "her" heaven and is now looking down to Earth watching her loved ones attempt to go on with their lives.

In Susie's Heaven, she lives in an apartment with a roommate. She can go to the high school that she so longed to attend on Earth.

The Lovely Bones Excerpt 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 that 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. ©2002 Alice Sebold Published with permission from Little, Brown & Co.

There are many dogs...because she wants there to be. Susie can have anything she desires in her Heaven...except the return of her life and the experiences she would have had while growing older.

All she can do now is watch from above. She sees the investigators trying to solve her case as her murderer destroys evidence.

She watches as her first love struggles with the feelings he still has for her and a young girl she brushed past on her departure from Earth becomes obsessed with first Susie and then others like her. And she is the silent witness to the slow descent of her parents' marriage.

Life goes on without Susie, but do those she left behind actually live or are they just going through the motions?

Bookworm's Briefing
Alice Sebold has chosen to tell this story from a very unique viewpoint . . . that of a murdered young girl. In this way, the reader is able to feel not only what the "survivors" are going through, but also share in the emotions of a girl plucked from existence before she had the chance to really live.

The characters are given dimension and become easy to identify with on many levels. That, matched up with the subject matter involved, makes this a story that will stick with the reader for some time.