[In the following review, Allardice contends that the characters and narrative of The Lovely Bones are overly conventional and fail to fulfill the novel's potential.]

“The dead don't die. They look on and help,” D H Lawrence once wrote. This consoling platitude lies at the heart of The Lovely Bones, a bestseller and critical triumph in America. Narrated by the spirit of a murdered teenager as she observes her grieving family from heaven, Sebold's at once brutally real and fanciful first novel is often as queasily sentimental as it sounds. It is also grimly captivating. “I was 14 when I was murdered on December 6, 1973,” Susie Salmon coolly introduces herself.

Sebold is as unsparing in the grisly details—a discarded elbow, bloodstains and saliva—as she is on the schmaltz. And as a meditation on the afterlife, the novel is spectrally fuzzy. Replete with swing sets and glossy magazines, Susie's heaven is an individual paradise, where the air is scented with skunk and kumquats and all her dreams on earth come true. In true Seventies style, Susie is greeted not by a stern St Peter, but by a female “intake counsellor”, an ex-social worker. More traditionally, her heaven is a favourite haunt of dead pets and grandparents—and, in Susie's tragic case, a sisterly victim support group.

But within this fantastical framework exist merely conventional narratives and characters. After the agonising account of Susie's disappearance, a domestic drama of disintegration and reconciliation unfolds, as Sebold knits together “the lovely bones” to repair the broken family. Susie's dad, a regular nice guy, has not unmerited suspicions as to the killer's identity, and buries his pain trying to prove his neighbour's guilt, while her mother takes refuge in “merciful adultery” with the police officer on the case. Through Susie's new insight, we see how cracks had already started to appear in her apparently happy childhood even before her death, as she comes to understand her mother's loneliness and frustration. She watches her younger sister with sympathy and envy as each unremarkable rite of passage—her first kiss, shaving her legs, graduation—becomes a reminder of Susie's lost youth.

Subverting the traditional crime novel, the investigation and killer are overshadowed by the victim and her family. We know whodunnit, after all. But given that her murderer is a textbook oddball whose hobbies include building doll's houses and mutilating small animals, he shouldn't be that hard to pin down—if the officer in charge had his mind on the job.

Only Susie is an entirely original creation. Blessed with omniscience and a naive charm, she makes the unimaginable bearable. But after a while, we begin to wonder if it weren't time that our spirited, forgivably egotistical, heroine were peacefully laid to rest. Giving a whole new meaning to the idea of transcendental sex, Sebold stretches the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief too far when a very unangelic Susie returns to earth to inhabit the body of a freaky school friend so she can get it together with her one-time sweetheart.

With its overwhelming affirmation of Christian values, the family and community, it is not hard to understand why The Lovely Bones has been such a success in the US. There are candlelit vigils around the murder site, and Sebold seems almost to invoke a sense of national mourning, so it is no surprise to hear a celestial rendition of Barber's Adagio for Strings.

This is an undoubtedly moving and shocking novel; how could it not be? It is all the more chilling to know that it is informed by very real personal experience. In her memoir, Lucky, Sebold describes how she herself was raped at 18. Later, she learnt that her attacker dragged another girl into the same tunnel and raped and killed her. The Lovely Bones, then, is also the story of the stranger who wasn't “lucky” enough to survive. There can be no happy ending to this story, and Sebold's attempts to make it uplifting seem uncomfortably manipulative. Ultimately, this tender novel fails to transcend its fey conceit, remaining uneasily poised between horror and whimsy, nightmare and fairy tale, ugliness and loveliness.