The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

This is the kind of book that makes young white women in MFA programs wistful: it's nicely written, it sold well and was critically accclaimed, it was released in mass-market form to be snapped up by fools in airports across the country. They're even making a movie out of it with Mark Wahlberg and that little girl who cried "Celia!" in those Atonement commercials. Though the premise of the story may seem a bit gimmicky (dead girl watches aftermath of her death on her family from Heaven), it is a smart gimmick. The circumstances of her death are pretty brutal and keep the book from straying into Hallmark-movie-of-the-week territory. My pet peeve is when writers, in an effort to sound literary, spend 18 pages describing a knitted potholder hanging in grandma's kitchen; this book doesn't do that, and is a pretty fast read with plenty of emotion and action to keep the ADHD crowd happy, but without the completely predictable plotline and cringe-worthy phrases of most books that make it to mass market. I may have cringed a little, but I also cried.

RATING: 64%