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my
latest fave read
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the
lovely bones by alice sebold
This is the story of a teenage girl murdered in the early seventies, told by the girl herself from heaven.
It is a beautifully written, and almost impossibly sad novel, but at the same time it is a warm and funny look at how families cope, or don't cope, with grief.
The Lovely Bones is the sort of novel which can change, or at least challenge, your perspective on life and death. It may not be perfect - and most of the book's true power is focused towards the beginning - but once you've read the first paragraph, and the brief description of the girl's murderer ('my mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer') you are completely hooked.
The account of heaven, pictured as a school playground where everything you want is there as soon as you think of it, is a staggering feat of genuis. This may be a fantasy, but the feelings conveyed within it are more vivid than in ninetynine percent of current fiction.
Read it and weep.
