SOURCE: Eder, Doris L. “The Saving Powers of Memory and Imagination in Alice Sebold's Lucky and The Lovely Bones.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism 193, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.

In the following essay, specially commissioned for Contemporary Literary Criticism, Eder offers a comparison of The Lovely Bones with Sebold's memoir, Lucky, discussing the novel's characterization, structure, and imaginative perspective.

Alice Sebold's two works published to date resemble each other in significant ways but also differ in important respects. The sardonically titled Lucky (1999),¹ a memoir about the author's rape at the age of eighteen, how the rapist was brought to trial and sentenced, and how she and her family survived the experience, was written before her best-selling debut novel, The Lovely Bones (2002).² In an interview, Sebold reveals she was struggling with a novel that had stalled when the voice of Susie Salmon...