The Lovely Bones book was, well to put it simply, amazing. It summed up things people don’t want to go through; most of which you will have to go through at some point in your life. The book portrayed the love of a family, the broken and tangled family that suddenly has their bonds pulled apart, and their love for one another and how their lost loved one ultimately drew them closer. The book follows the story of Susie Salmon and her journey to heaven, watching her family from a gazebo in the “in between” of heaven and earth. The “in between” shows Susie her families’ sorrow, her mother’s downfall, her father’s depression and denial, and it’s all so unimaginably real.
From the beginning you know who killed Susie because she tells you; however, the book opens the reader’s eyes to the world. Mr. Harvey was a strange man who keeps to himself, no one suspects him of being capable of killing a 14-year-old girl. But he does just that, with no regrets or sympathy. There are men like Mr. Harvey, seemingly kind or everyday people, who turn out to be monsters. Like the man who held a women captive in his backyard for 18 years. The nightmare of losing someone is indescribable, but Sebold portrayed how it might feel through her characters, and how most people would react. This is a book I will require my children to read, just to prove adults are right about the dangers of strangers.
The movie “The Lovely Bones” was beautiful in its scenes and imagery, but didn’t accomplish the theme of the story as well as the book. It left out characters and information, and twisted the best of the plot into something less interesting. If you haven’t read the book, it was probably a bit unclear as to how or why some things happened. Though the movie did not live up to the hype, actress Saoirse Ronan and actor Mark Wahlberg, really kept the movie from being completely “un watchable”. I would place Ronan on the same level as child actors like Dakota Fanning and Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin. To someone who has never read the book, “The Lovely Bones” was a good movie.
