Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Sebold, Alice - Sarah Churchwell (review date 23 August 2002)

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Sarah Churchwell (review date 23 August 2002)

SOURCE: Churchwell, Sarah. “A Neato Heaven.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5186 (23 August 2002): 19.

[In the following review, Churchwell praises the first half of The Lovely Bones, but derides the novel's latter half, calling it “saccharine” and “false.”]

Alice Sebold's first novel [The Lovely Bones], which has been top of the American bestseller lists for weeks, is narrated by fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, who has just been raped and murdered by a serial killer and is now in heaven sadly watching the effects of her death on her family and friends. Not a murder mystery (Susie knows perfectly well who killed her, and doesn't dissemble), The Lovely Bones concerns effects, not causes. Susie must learn the same lessons about loss as her family: as they become reconciled to losing her, she must become reconciled to losing them—and herself. “Heaven wasn't...

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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