I should have played a video game....

Book Review - "The Lovely Bones" - Alice Sebold - 2.5 stars

I'd like to start out by apologizing to any poor soul who may come across this review and read it, as I have never written a book review before and this will turn out to be a pointless waste of your time - just as reading "The Lovely Bones" was to me.

Now onto my next apology; I apologize to any person who was encouraged to read this book and was influenced with phrases such as "good writing" and "touching story" because I found this book to be far from genius literature. I would put a Gossip Girl novel in the literary time capsule to represent this period of time before I put in "The Lovely Bones."

The book doesn't try to deceive you at any point in time; Alice tells you everything straight-up so you never have anything to ponder in regards to "what will happen next!?" The problem with books like this is that they have no ending, but creative writing classes encourage modern writers to struggle their way through writing these stories so they get practice, despite having no satisfying way to end the story. These classes should also be addressing that the writers should not /publish/ these stories.

The first chapter is interesting. This is purely because the overall idea of the story (having a dead girl look down on family and friends while in her own little heaven) is a fairly brilliant concept. The writing is not exceptional in my opinion until the end of chapter nine or chapter ten. There were two sentences that pulled at my heart strings and, therefore, kept me glued to the book until the last five or six chapters. It seems as though those first nine or ten and last five or six chapters were not edited. I felt as if they were so poorly written in comparison the body of the book that they must have been written by another person.

The middle of the book was amazing - and that is where the 2.5 stars that I have awarded this book come from. Now we come to the end and this is where I will avoid spoiling the book.

The end of the book, stated simply, was an insult to my intelligence and my interests. There is an ending part involving Susie/Ruth/Ray that absolutely disgusted me for three reasons: it completely contradicted the idea that Susie was powerless; Susie, being a rape victim, would not have reacted the way she did; and I felt as if Alice Sebold had no idea how to end the story so she just went and threw in this twist because she felt it would melt the hearts of her pathetic female readers - which would be better than having a regular crap ending.

All in all, I would say you should read the book. However, I would recommend you to stop reading when people are starting to grow up a little too quickly. You'll know what I mean.