Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Sebold, Alice - Claudia FitzHerbert (review date 21 June 2003)

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Claudia FitzHerbert (review date 21 June 2003)

SOURCE: FitzHerbert, Claudia. “Two Bites at the Cherry.” Spectator 292, no. 9124 (21 June 2003): 65.

[In the following review, FitzHerbert compares The Lovely Bones with Lucky, finding the former an unsuccessful attempt to improve on the author's memoir.]

Alice Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University when she was brutally raped by a stranger in a park in 1981. Several months later she recognised her attacker in the street. He was arrested, prosecuted and jailed. Sebold, a virgin at the time of the attack, was a wise-cracking clown with literary ambitions from a bookish family in Philadelphia. She was praised by a detective involved in the case as ‘the best rape witness’ he had ever seen. A year later her student house was broken into and her best friend raped. Sebold's celebrity as a successful rape victim was in the end too much for her room-mate, who cut loose...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Alice Sebold and Ann Darby (interview date 17 June 2002)
   2. Paula L. Woods (review date 7 July 2002)
   3. Ron Charles (review date 25 July 2002)
   4. Charlotte Abbott (essay date 29 July 2002)
   5. Lisa Allardice (review date 19 August 2002)
   6. Sarah Churchwell (review date 23 August 2002)
   7. Virginia Quarterly Review (review date autumn 2002)
   8. Stephen H. Webb (review date 9-22 October 2002)
   9. Rebecca Mead (review date 17 October 2002)
   10. Gordon Phinn (review date November 2002)
   11. Daniel Mendelsohn (essay date 16 January 2003)
   12. Joyce Carol Oates (review date 20 June 2003)
   13. Claudia FitzHerbert (review date 21 June 2003)
   14. Andrea Dworkin (review date 30 June 2003)
   15. Doris L. Eder (essay date 2004)
   16. Kenneth Womack (essay date 2004)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Alice Sebold