SOURCE: FitzHerbert, Claudia. “Two Bites at the Cherry.” Spectator 292, no. 9124 (21 June 2003): 65.

In the following review, FitzHerbert compares The Lovely Bones with Lucky, finding the former an unsuccessful attempt to improve on the author's memoir.

Alice Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University when she was brutally raped by a stranger in a park in 1981. Several months later she recognised her attacker in the street. He was arrested, prosecuted and jailed. Sebold, a virgin at the time of the attack, was a wise-cracking clown with literary ambitions from a bookish family in Philadelphia. She was praised by a detective involved in the case as ‘the best rape witness’ he had ever seen. A year later her student house was broken into and her best friend raped. Sebold's celebrity as a successful rape victim was in the end too much for her room-mate, who cut loose from the friendship when...