Now a major motion picture. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon.

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."

* * *   * * *   * * *   * * *   * * *
                                                             
......trapped in a perfect world.
Welcome to Susie Salmon's heaven! It can look like Nova Scotia, Tangiers or even Tibet; anything you have dreamed of. A heaven, where there is no cornfield, no murder, no grave; but there is something......something Susie needs to learn. She needs to forget the endless pain brought to her from the living world, she needs forget the unspeakable grief brought to her family; threatening to tear their love apart and smash it into pieces: slivers and shattered bits of glass. Susie was merely fourteen when she was murdered in a cornfield: a tragedy that relishes in the agony of her family, nibbling at their shins and leaving them to question, "Where has our Susie gone to?" A mother, endeavoring to seek for the door that will somehow lead her out of a broken heart, finds an open door - she stands at the edge of her daughter's room, not having the courage to take another step. She feels it then.....the excruciating pain piercing through her flesh and into her heart.....tears begin sliding off her cheeks; she commands her tears to conceal themselves beneath her wet eyelashes, breathes in and shuts the door, without looking back. A father, however, communicates with her daughter through a flickering candle flame, a geranium flower, a snow globe.....and every single piece of memory that has been held in its own place. A mother seeks comfort in another man. A father, however, seeks comfort in his own son. Each one of them struggles to mend the visible cracks....but who notices the obscure crannies? No one.....but Susie.

Death itself is nothing but a hushed gentle breeze disappearing into the atmosphere, but murder.......changes everything. Susie's murderer is a man from her neighborhood; a solitary shadow overwhelmed by aloofness, a single man who has never married, an outcast named George Harvey. As Susie's father begins to harbor suspicion for his bizarre antics and starts an investigation on him, Mr.Harvey covers each of his tracks of which could have been an evidence of Susie's brutal murder, leaving none of them behind. He feeds on the delicious moans of death, but often thirsts for more. But what he has never understood is the immeasurable and unconditional love a father can have for his daughter. Love is something beyond his comprehensible mind; love is something so vast, so great, so magnificent......
it is beyond infinity.


The Lovely Bones, with Alice Sebold's brilliant craftsmanship of words encased in a net of fantasy and reality, reflects our grievous but transcendent moments in life, impeccable beauty out of misery and despair, hope and love out of tragedy and loss.........a captivating work of a genius!

A bloodshed enveloped in a funnel of miracles, a compelling tale filled with a little brother's innocence, a sister's courage, a father's bottomless love and.......a mother's wounded heart; a mother, who has needed the time to know that the undiminished love she has had for her daughter would not destroy her, finds herself walking through that same door again. The pine floorboards underneath her feet creak softly as she walks into her daughter's bedroom - for the very first time since her death. She closes her eyes, breathes in and whispers into the air, "I love you, Susie." She has needed the time, and Susie has given her that time. I can imagine tears of joy rolling down in heaven now, glistening under the sun.
* * *   * * *   * * *   * * *   * * *

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened when I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

I wish you all a long and happy life.  :)