SOURCE: Phinn, Gordon. “Adolescent Afterlife.” Books in Canada 31, no. 8 (November 2002): 10-11.

In the following review, Phinn offers a negative assessment of The Lovely Bones, characterizing it as sentimental and predictable.

In the fall of 1999, when the film The Sixth Sense was so suddenly and hugely successful, National Post columnist Len Blum, in one of his weekly columns, sought to grasp the movie's remarkable word of mouth reputation. While thinking that it obviously connected with our innate sense of unworthiness and fear of failure, he felt its major magic was to “tap into our desire to commune with loved ones who have died, to tell them we love them, to resolve things left unresolved.” One suspects the wild success of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones mines the same cavern of unrequited longing in our oh-so-secular and cynical culture. In the midst of our high tech savvy and soft core...