The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. A clever structure, having the victim of the murder the narrator. For the most part it is strong, right on; the story only takes a couple of tired turns, but then the murderer dying from an icicle is a sort of justice, but maybe it felt lame.
A couple of passages came very close to my own vision of poetic narration, telling in one paragraph what a handful of characters in separate places were doing; using semicolons to help blur them together. More complex narrative structure as well, the novel jumps around in time yet it is easy to follow. The effort to flesh out the mother was least successful. She somehow is still flat, with an expected, clichéd progression.
The characters are more real, solid, fleshed out at the beginning of the novel and become less real, more distant as the work progresses. Less defined, which, if intended, works because it is pointed out that the bond between the narrator from heaven and people left on Earth becomes naturally less over time. Although since the narrator is telling the story, the narrator still knows, and sustaining the characters is a challenge whenever a first-person narrative voice is used.
One practical point: I got the names Ruth and another character confused (was it Holly? or the grandmother?), and as there are lots of “R” names in the book, perhaps it isn’t surprising. Come to think if it, most of the characters had fairly cliched stories, perhaps none more than the father, who injures his knee a few pages after we are told, “he could have danced on Broadway;” also his heart attack comes across a bit predictably. The whole plot borders on melodrama, but it works very well as an entertainment. The character of the grandmother is particularly well presented, probably the most real human character in the piece.
