SOURCE: Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Virginia Quarterly Review 78, no. 4 (autumn 2002): 126.

In the following review, the critic praises Sebold's The Lovely Bones, citing the author's originality and attention to detail.

If someone were to recommend to me a book about a murdered 14-year-old girl who tells her tale from Heaven, I would flee, fearful of drowning in sentiment and cliché. Much to my surprise, and to Sebold's considerable skills as a novelist, this book [The Lovely Bones]—which does indeed adopt the voice of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a next-door neighbor—is fresh, exquisitely crafted, original, and deeply moving. Sebold, author of a memoir of her own horrific rape (Lucky), draws us powerfully into Susie's world as she watches her family—father, mother, younger sister and brother—and friends disintegrate, then reconstitute themselves as the wound...