Resistance is Futile: On Reading The Lovely Bones
For the longest time, I resisted.
I refused to read The Lovely Bones. I was adamant that I didn’t want to go anywhere near a book narrated by a teenage girl who’d been raped and murdered. We all have certain lines about stories we will and won’t read and I just couldn’t go there. Even when my sister-in-law read it, even when friends read it, even when they insisted I would love the book, I always declined. Then my friend Ilene read it and, like the others, she said it was amazing. I still didn’t want to crack the spine, but I was also intrigued about what I was missing. So I insisted she tell me how it started and ended. I wanted the spoilers, even if I wasn’t going to read it. Especially because I wasn’t going to read it. But I would at least know what the buzz was all about.
“Are you sure you want to know?” she asked. I insisted I did. So she told me the story and the famous scene between Ray and Susie (or, really, Susie in Ray’s body), but mostly she conveyed that while heart-wrenching, the novel was, as the title suggests, quite lovely. It was then that I decided I could handle it.
And it was like a gift. It’s the kind of book that’s more than a book, the kind of story that lives inside of you, and when you put it down, it stays with you, it lingers, it makes you think there is grace and beauty and that all things are possible. The Lovely Bones might just be the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.
