"My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."

I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me.... He was inside me. He was grunting.... I was the mortar. He was the pestle.... He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all.... I was still breathing. I knew he was killing me.... I did not realize then that I was already an animal dying.... "Tell me you love me", he said. Gently, I did. The end came anyway.... (Excerpt from the novel)

Review:

Over the past few months I have been visiting my "to read" bookcase and plowing through the various titles that have been calling my name for two years now. This book was on the top of my list and I had high hopes, but it just fell flat. Sometimes when I hear all the hype about a book and wait a few years for the hype to die down I enjoy the book more, but that was not the case here. Thinking about it, I wish I would have read this book when it came out a few years back.

For starters, the pacing was very inconsistent, and I found myself bored and skimming whole pages. Whenever there was a glimpse of hope in the story line, it burnt out too quickly and I was let down hard. I noticed that I developed a strong sense of detachment from the characters and their situations and in the end, I just wanted the murderer to get caught. The sex scene at the end with Susie and Ray was not even relevant to the story line and felt it was unnecessary and dull. I hated the ending and felt like their wasn't really any closure with the underdeveloped characters. Overall, this book was not original and completely forgettable. This definitely wasn’t the read for me.

Author Biography: Alice Sebold was born in 1963 and grew up in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia. In her essay "The Oddity of Suburbia," she confesses that she despised suburbia, but after living in both Manhattan and Southern California, she "realiz[ed] … that within the suburban world of [her] upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world." Her novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), reflects her realization that suburbia can and does contain "a bottomless well of narrative ideas." However, that realization did not occur until Sebold left Philadelphia. (Taken from Book Rags)