After seeing the trailer for the movie on a video sharing site, I finally got down to placing a hold for it at my local library. I'd known about The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold since ninth grade but always put off on reading it, and I'm glad I did because after making it through the whole story I feel like I wouldn't have been able to truly appreciate the intensity and skill of Sebold if I'd read the novel as a freshman.

It's a great read and I definitely recommend it, but not to readers who can't handle the seriousness of its contents. I don't think I can do The Lovely Bones justice with my relatively mediocre level of description, so instead I'll quote an excerpt from one of its reviews.

"Don't start The Lovely Bones unless you can finish it. The book begins with more horror than you could imagine, but closes with more beauty than you could hope for....Alice Sebold has done something miraculous here."

-- Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor