THE LOVELY BONES

"I was 14 when I was murdered . . . ." That’s the opening and also the astonishing conceit of this first novel. It’s narrated from heaven. Tricked, raped, and knifed to death, Susie Salmon was the sort of innocent who had just learned that "gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren’t." The book was raved about in advance by Jonathan Franzen and Anna Quindlen, and so its success seems guaranteed. This is a dream, of course, a wish fulfillment, but this is a dream with grit. Alyssa Bresnahan brings the corpse to passionate life, her voice by turns ecstatic and heavy with tears. Susie dies still thinking of first kisses. When the novel closes, she’s a woman fulfilled and has learned to "hold the world without me in it." B.H.C. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 02]