The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death:

“At first it sounds like a high-concept movie, one of those supernatural heart-tuggers like Ghost or The Sixth Sense: the story of a teenage girl’s rape and murder, and the fallout those events have on her family, as narrated from heaven by the dead girl herself.

As it turns out, however, Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery. What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott’s That Night, about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed — slowly, grudgingly and in fragments — through love and acceptance.” NY Times book review