Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Sebold, Alice - Virginia Quarterly Review (review date autumn 2002)


Sebold, Alice - Virginia Quarterly Review (review date autumn 2002)

Virginia Quarterly Review (review date autumn 2002)

SOURCE: Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Virginia Quarterly Review 78, no. 4 (autumn 2002): 126.

[In the following review, the critic praises Sebold's The Lovely Bones, citing the author's originality and attention to detail.]

If someone were to recommend to me a book about a murdered 14-year-old girl who tells her tale from Heaven, I would flee, fearful of drowning in sentiment and cliché. Much to my surprise, and to Sebold's considerable skills as a novelist, this book [The Lovely Bones]—which does indeed adopt the voice of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a next-door neighbor—is fresh, exquisitely crafted, original, and deeply moving. Sebold, author of a memoir of her own horrific rape (Lucky), draws us powerfully into Susie's world as she watches her family—father, mother, younger sister...

[The entire page is 228 words long]

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