Entertaining the Alien

24. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

There are so many big mainstream books from the past year that I haven't even looked at, but if nothing else, this job has given me a chance to get my hands on them and start reading. The Lovely Bones was another lunch hour book, and that may have been a mistake, because it nearly made me cry on several occasions.

It's interesting, because here's another literary book with a strong speculative element to it. For folks who haven't heard of it, The Lovely Bones starts with the murder of a middle school girl, and the rest of the book is from her perspective, looking down on her family and friends (not to mention her murderer) from heaven. Don't let that fool you, it's not as treacly as I feared it would be. Instead, it has some pretty powerful things to say about how different people deal with tragedy. I don't know if I can say that I enjoyed it, necessarily, that seems like the wrong word to use. But it will stay with me, of that I have no doubt. Well worth a read.