SOURCE: Allardice, Lisa. Review of The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. New Statesman 131, no. 4601 (19 August 2002): 39.

In the following review, Allardice contends that the characters and narrative of The Lovely Bones are overly conventional and fail to fulfill the novel's potential.

“The dead don't die. They look on and help,” D H Lawrence once wrote. This consoling platitude lies at the heart of The Lovely Bones, a bestseller and critical triumph in America. Narrated by the spirit of a murdered teenager as she observes her grieving family from heaven, Sebold's at once brutally real and fanciful first novel is often as queasily sentimental as it sounds. It is also grimly captivating. “I was 14 when I was murdered on December 6, 1973,” Susie Salmon coolly introduces herself.

Sebold is as unsparing in the grisly details—a discarded elbow, bloodstains and saliva—as she is on the schmaltz. And as a meditation on...