The Lovely Bones

[thelake]

It's been such an emotional journey. I loved everything about this book (well, maybe the ending could have been better, but doesn't matter). I loved;

- How ordinary words and situations formed a magical background to everything Susie felt and saw in heaven.
- How she lived on through her sister, Lindsey. ♥
- How she shared Ruth's body and mind for one last kiss with Ray... I so wished for something like that to happen..
- Jack Salmon's love for all his children, but his inabilty to leave Susie behind and love his living kids even more. How he stayed behind after his wife Abigail left because she couldn't cope, but Jack was never mad, never disappointed (maybe a little, but he understood) and how he felt complete again when his "Ocean Eyes" showed up in the hospital ♥
- How Buckley was so mad at his mom and said "Fuck you." in the car and he was right. I wanted to say fuck you so many times to Abigail, but that was the way she coped (or gave up on everything), therefore I never truly hated her. She wasn't a good mother, yet she was a decent woman. She missed Jack, she buttoned up his shirt on a pillow and hugged him at night...
- How Grandma Lynn tried to fill the void her daughter left behind, she was simply amazing.
- How Lindsey and Samuel made it until the end! I was constantly waiting for something to break them up, but they never did! I'm so happy!

I am not satisfied with the ending, but that's not because it was badly written or wrong, it's just too real. There isn't absolute justice in the world. Yes, George Harvey died, but I wished he was bruttally murdered, cut into little pieces, bleed, scream! But Susie got over it, Salmons got over it so I guess I should, too.

I can't wait to see the movie tonight. Thank God for awards season and dvd screeners!

Now onto couple of excerpts I noted down;

I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't let myself miss my mother and father, brother and sister. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly, but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

***

When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

***

Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care of a child took with an adult.

***

Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer, the oldest resident of my heaven, would bring out her violin. Holly trod lightly on her horn. They would do a duet. One woman old and silent, one woman not past girl yet. Back and forth, a crazy schizoid solace they'd create.
All the dancers would slowly go inside. The song reverberated until Holly, for a final time, passed the tune over, and Mrs. Utemeyer, quiet, upright, historical, finished with a jig.
The house asleep by then; this was my Evensong.

***

[While Buckley and Jack was playing Monopoly, Jack explained his son how Susie always used the little shoe to play.]

My father did not want to say "because life is unfair" or "because that's how it is." He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old. He placed his hand on the small of Buckley's back.
"Susie is dead," he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. "Do you know what that means?"
Buckley reached over with his hands and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right. My father nodded. "You won't see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will." My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not fully understand.
Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.

***

Lindsey's face flushed; mine flushed up in heaven.
I forgot my father in the family room and my mother counting silver. I saw Lindsey move toward Samuel Heckler. She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.

***

That week Ray would kiss me by my locker. It didn't happen up on the scaffold when he'd wanted it to. Our only kiss was like an accident -- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

***

At 14, my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.