SOURCE: Churchwell, Sarah. “A Neato Heaven.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5186 (23 August 2002): 19.

In the following review, Churchwell praises the first half of The Lovely Bones, but derides the novel's latter half, calling it “saccharine” and “false.”

Alice Sebold's first novel [The Lovely Bones], which has been top of the American bestseller lists for weeks, is narrated by fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, who has just been raped and murdered by a serial killer and is now in heaven sadly watching the effects of her death on her family and friends. Not a murder mystery (Susie knows perfectly well who killed her, and doesn't dissemble), The Lovely Bones concerns effects, not causes. Susie must learn the same lessons about loss as her family: as they become reconciled to losing her, she must become reconciled to losing them—and herself. “Heaven wasn't perfect”, Susie observes, deadpan, on being informed that she will be...