SOURCE: Woods, Paula L. “Holding On and Letting Go.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 July 2002): 7.

In the following review, Woods describes The Lovely Bones as “a strange and beautiful amalgam of novelistic styles.”

The mere whisper of their names is painful—Polly Klaas, Danielle van Dam, Elizabeth Smart, Shanta Johnson—for they represent a parent's unspeakable heartache and a nation's vicarious nightmare. They are the little girls, and girls are most at risk for such mayhem. Some eventually are found dead; others simply disappear. We read their stories, hear the soundbites and wonder: What really happened to these lost girls? How on Earth do their families survive the horror? How would we bear such a tragedy in our own households? They are questions to which we seldom find answers, turning back ultimately, gratefully, to our happier-by-comparison lives.

Alice Sebold, however, boldly steps into that unimaginable territory in her...