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The Lovely Bones (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

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Drawing on folkloric and religious motifs and ideas, Alice Sebold presents a remarkable, complex, and comforting vision of heaven as the platform from which Susie Salmon, raped and murdered by a neighbor at the age of fourteen, tells her story. It is a heaven that indeed has many “mansions,” one of which is the “wide wide Heaven,” which can provide one’s every desire. It also grants omniscience to the narrator. The word Susie’s grandfather has for the dominant quality of this heaven is “comfort,” and oddly comforting, indeed, is Alice Sebold’s novel because it...

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