The Lovely Bones
The Lovely Bones
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The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by American writer Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from a personal heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death. The novel received critical praise and became an instant bestseller.

A film adaptation, directed by Peter Jackson, who personally purchased the rights, was released in 2009. The novel was also later adapted as a play of the same name, which premiered in England in 2018 and toured in several cities.

The novel's title is taken from a quotation at the novel's conclusion, when Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death:

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 brought 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.

On December 6, 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon takes a shortcut home from school through a cornfield in Norristown, Pennsylvania. George Harvey, her 36-year-old neighbor, a bachelor who builds doll houses for a living, persuades her to look at an underground kid's hideout he constructed in the field. After she goes into the hideout, he rapes and murders her. He puts her remains in a safe that he dumps in a sinkhole, and throws her charm bracelet into a pond. Susie's spirit flees toward her personal Heaven; it rushes past her classmate, social outcast Ruth Connors, who sees Susie's ghostly spirit.

The Salmon family initially refuses to believe that Susie is dead, until a neighbor's dog finds Susie's elbow. The police talk to Harvey, finding him odd but not suspicious. Susie's father, Jack, gradually suspects Harvey. Jack's surviving daughter, Lindsey, eventually shares this sentiment. Jack takes an extended leave from work. Meanwhile, another of Susie's classmates, Ray Singh, who had a crush on Susie in school, develops a friendship with Ruth, drawn together by their connection with Susie.

Later, Detective Len Fenerman tells the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night, Jack peers out of his den window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing Harvey is returning to destroy evidence, Jack runs out to confront him, armed with a baseball bat. The figure is not Harvey, but Clarissa, Susie's best friend who is dating Brian, one of Susie's classmates. As Susie watches in horror from heaven, Brian—who was going to meet Clarissa in the cornfield—nearly beats Jack to death, and Clarissa breaks Jack's knee, as they believed he was after them. While Jack recovers from knee replacement surgery, Susie's grieving mother, Abigail, begins an affair with the widowed Det. Fenerman.

Trying to help her father prove his suspicions, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a diagram of the underground den. She leaves when Harvey unexpectedly returns. The police do not arrest Lindsey for breaking and entering. Harvey flees from Norristown. Later, evidence is discovered that links Harvey to Susie's murder and those of several other girls. In heaven, Susie meets Harvey's other victims and sees into his traumatic childhood.

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