SOURCE: Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Novel of the Year.” New York Review of Books 50, no. 1 (16 January 2003): 4-8.

In the following essay, Mendelsohn complains that The Lovely Bones suffers from poor-quality writing and has the moral, social, and emotional seriousness of sugary pop songs and TV movies of the week.

1.

On May 22 of this year, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold's debut novel [The Lovely Bones], which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who's been raped and murdered, the novelist and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared on the Today show and declared that if people had one book to read during the summer, “it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It's destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's one of the best books I've read in years.” Viewers did what they were...