I was recently searching for an audiobook for a long drive and landed on The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
Hard opening to the book – you get right to the rape and murder of the young teenage narrator.
Then it tapers off and I generally found it decently written until … her spirit comes to Earth, she inhabits her friend’s body, and sleeps with her high school crush a decade or so after her death.
Was this a WTF moment for anyone else? I know we occasionally see things like this happen in Hollywood, but this felt jarring and out of place. For me it was a strange episode in an otherwise solid story.
by Wandering_Texan80
26 Comments
yea, I can see what you mean. We read that book in our book club a good while ago, but I do remember that I didn’t exactly enjoy that whole end of the book.
I did not like the ending either. The premise of the book was rather strange, but enjoyable. The ending was a step too far for me.
I watched the movie before I read the book and was moved while being rather uncomfortable. The subject matter can be hard to watch/read, but when I saw the book on sale I jumped on the chance to get it. I liked it, but the end where she comes to earth and sleeps with her crush through her friends body was so out of left field and awkward to read, it killed the enjoyment. From there I just rushed to finish it. It’s definitely something I bring up when talking about weird experiences while reading, especially one geared towards a young adult audience.
I literally threw the book away after reading that. So stupid.
Googled how it ended. Killer met his comeuppance in a really cheap way so i guess i didn’t miss much
Yes! I kept waiting for her to go visit her family but instead she went to sleep (sleep? really?) and shot her brother a quick call before losing her earthly form again. I get that she missed out on growing up and experiencing all the little milestones she had been watching her sister and friends go through, but her family clearly mattered more to her all those years dead and it’s creepy to use someone else’s body to hook up. Perhaps she thought she’d have more time but who could possibly sleep at a time like that?
Yeah, that moment was really out of place. Okay, Susie got a chance to bodily return to Earth — and she used it all just to hook up with her crush? Not to reconnect with her heavily traumatized FAMILY? Not to, you know, try and tell the police about HARVEY, who is at that point still alive and kicking?
In Ghost (the 1990 film, and really one of my favorite pieces of afterlife fiction in any medium, no pun intended), Sam, too, rather stupidly uses up his short while of bodily presence for a dance with Molly, but at least in his case, she is his longtime girlfriend whom he really loves and clearly the person who shared the closest bond with him in his lifetime!
Totally agree! I quite liked it up to that point but couldn’t take it seriously after that, it was just ridiculous.
I only watched the film but that was definitely a completely jarring moment.
That said, when I think about it, there is something to be said about her wanting to overwrite the only sexual experience she had in life (the rape directly before her murder) with something positive and happy. And she’s been watching her family slowly work to move on for years, what would be the benefit of bringing everything back to them again?
It’s weird that it’s in someone else’s body and not at all what I expected from it, but I can kind of see the logic.
I disagree. I loved the book and its pacing and the narrator. I loved the metaphors in there too. I felt this book deeply and personally . It is a great book. I read it way before I saw the movie.
This book will forever be tainted in my eyes due to the fact that she [falsely accused an innocent man](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/nyregion/anthony-broadwater-alice-sebold-wrongful-conviction.html#:~:text=Sebold%2C%20a%20well%2Dknown%20novelist,in%20her%20memoir%20%E2%80%9CLucky.%E2%80%9D&text=New%20York%20State%20has%20agreed,college%20student%20in%20Syracuse%2C%20N.Y.) of SA her
We read this book *in school,* lmao. The opening didn’t bother me, it’s supposed to be horrifying. I don’t love the ghost possession tho. I had totally forgotten about that part tbh.
Omg I finally found people who agree. I read it in high school and hated the ending.
I felt the whole book could’ve been a lot shorter. I was getting pretty bored with the random descriptions that I think the author thought were poignant but to me were just overkill and unnecessary…like the main character looking out a window and describing and tree and the whole landscape, etc. It was just a lot of focus on extraneous details imo.
I read this book maybe a decade ago, but I straight up don’t remember any of the WTF parts you described. I’m certain I finished the book so I must have just swept those bits into the mental dustpan. The parts that stuck with me the most were the stories of her family falling apart in the aftermath.
Her spirit didn’t really age or mature in the sense a person would and time didn’t pass the same for her either, so she still had earthly desires unfulfilled and it’s a trope that fulfilling those desires is part of moving on.
Yeah that chapter should have just been edited out.
Yeah, that first chapter is a friggin’ ride. I almost did a book report on it in school and had to set it down after reading it the first chapter.
yes, utter fuckin garbage, especially since you were supposed to still empathise with her after she inflicted rape on her friend. one of the few books that went in the trash.
I had the exact same issue with the book! Was fine until that moment.
This book was quite popular. I read it. Later, I watched the movie.
Still hate it.
One of the few books I’ve ever dropped and not finished. I found the beginning so bleak and disturbing that I couldn’t motivate myself to finish. Good to know I didn’t miss anything lol.
Also the author’s real life sexual assault case unfortunately resulted in a wrongful imprisonment. There was some ambiguity of how much the police were pressuring her to point out the wrong suspect.
I hated this book. And now I hate it even more that the author made money off of her SA stories and wrongly accused a man who went to prison because of her accusations.
You know, I read this in high school and remember really liking it. Reading all these comments I’m kinda doubting it would hold up on a reread.
One of the all time worst endings to an otherwise good book. Just let the story end before all the shenanigans!
Well, that plot twist took a detour from “coming-of-age” to “coming back from the dead” real quick. 😳