Lovely Bones Book Response #1

      I am reading the book Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It is a captivating novel about a fourteen year old girl who is raped and murdered. She watches from heaven as her family deals with their loss and people seek to find the person who killed her. My favorite line so far in this story was the very first two sentences. They completely grabbed your attention and made you want to read more. It was, "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." It set up the story by making you interested in what was going on. Someone was murdered and you had to find out who, and why. But also there was an eerie way of telling the story because the girl was talking from her grave. She was dead but still talking about her life. It makes you wonder who is she? What happened? And most of all where and what is she doing now? The afterlife is one of the many things that us humans can not comprehend. Many people have different beliefs but there is no actual proof of what happens when we die. We can't find out because the only people who do know are not around to explain it. Naturally, we are curious about the unknown. What is it like? Alice Sebold does a great job of making the story suspenseful and intriguing. With that interesting beginning it is hard to put the book down.
         This book makes you wonder about a lot of things. It is that type of novel that you finish a couple chapters before bed and spend the next hour thinking about it. There are different predictions and possibilities, questions and thoughts that are raised. It always leaves you thinking and is hard to put down. What it made me wonder about was the idea of death. What happens after people die? In this novel Susie goes up to heaven where everything she wants is possible. She has a type of guardian angel that looks after her and she makes friends and begins her life in heaven. She watches her family and friends start life again without her, and watches the police and detectives search for her killer all the while wishing she could tell them who it was. In her heaven Susie can have anything, except the only thing she wants which is her family and friends. She wants to be alive again. But she can't; at fourteen her life has ended. She will never finish high school, go to college, get a job, or get married. Her life was brought abruptly to a halt and she will never get to know. I wonder what it must be like to have to watch your family struggle with loosing you. I bet she misses them and wishes she could still talk to them. She has to watch them try to find her killer, all along knowing exactly who they should be looking for. I wonder what its like to be in heaven. I know that they can have whatever they want in heaven, but what about their families? Susie will spend the rest of her time in heaven watching. Waiting until someday her family will be there too. So really, heaven isn't all that great. Finally, I wonder what happens after that. Does she stay in heaven fort he rest of eternity or is she reborn? Can you die again in heaven? This book raises a lot of questions that really make you think.
       What surprised me in this book was how easy it was for that man to kill her. I always thought about how unlikely that would be and how it could never happen. But in reality, this is actually not that extreme. Kids naturally assume the best in everyone. It shocked me how easily a person could do that and how difficult it was for detectives to find them. In movies the police can always find the criminal but in real life it is a lot more difficult. Especially with someone as good at murder as he was. It surprised me how much the murder of one person can affect so many different peoples lives. With one person gone from the world so many things begin to change, the cycle and rythm that people cling to is broken. Everything begins to change and it affects everyone.
         This book really upset me at times. How could that man kill an innocent girl? How could he live with himself? It was clear that he was smart, definitely not mentally disabled and he knew what he was doing. He made a plan and perfectly executed it with out feeling any remorse. I wonder what kind of thoughts ran through his head when he killed her. How he could possibly justify the murder of a fourteen year old girl to himself. The next couple days he even talked to the father about how sorry he was for their loss, as if nothing ever happened. How could he look into the eyes of all the people he had hurt? How could he live seeing her family and friends suffer each and every day? I wonder what kind of person could do that, and I wish I knew what he was thinking, what any of those people are thinking when they do something as terrible as that. Over all, I really enjoyed this book so far and I can't wait to see what the next pages unfold.