In her novel The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold asks us what
             responsibilities families have for each other and argues that the
             connections wrought by blood and love never end. She tells her story from
             the vantage of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, whose responsibilities to her
             family should have ended in 1973, when she was raped and murdered by her
             neighbor. But just as her family has not forgotten her, she does not forget
             them, and spends the novel looking down on them from heaven where "life is
             The novel successfully and innovatively plays with the ancient idea
             that the dead do not leave us entirely until after they have finished their
             business on earth, and Susie still has unfinished business with her family
             (whom are devastated by their grief), with her killer, with the detective
             trying to solve her murder. She grieves along with her family, each of whom
             is undone in a different way by the fact of her death. And she grieves for
             herself, for the life that she should have had. She is simultaneously
             wretched that the woman she might have been casts a terrible shadow over
             her younger sister while at the same time she is even angrier that she will
             This a story about what the living owe to the dead and the dead to the
             living and the ways in which we never, ever escape our families. But it is
             also a celebration of love and of hope, and of the precious joys that each
             day brings until death makes all things past.
             ...