Just got done reading Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones on Saturday. It was a book that had grabbed my attention thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter, of all things. She has a song on her new CD, Between Here and Gone, called "My Heaven" which by all accounts is inspired by The Lovely Bones. It paints this great picture of heaven from the eyes of the narrator--a heaven filled with all the things that she loved in life and what would have been a paradise had she had the option to create it on Earth. It's a gorgeous song in it's simplicity, mostly because MCC hardly ever overstates anything. But anyway, I picked up the book at the Ames library a couple weeks ago and it has a beginning you just can't stop reading. There were drops in the narrative toward the middle, but by the end, I was mostly just tired of hearing Susie Salmon be so self-involved. Plus when she was able to inhabit people a la The Exorcist I found myself just kind of sighing and waiting for the book to be over. It's too bad, because it could have been really good because Sebold is an excellent writer and is capable of telling a good story.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not sorry I read the book, but it just wasn't everything it could have been.
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