Genre Fiction

After her rape and murder in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon (”like the fish”) continues to live on as the narrator of her own murder mystery in The Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold.

The unique voice - being both a child and the dead victim - gives this book its innocent tone. You are pulled in by the sweet young teen who has seen and known too much. She tells you who killed her before her parents know, which makes for some great opportunities for the reader to know more than the victim’s family.

Six years after finishing this read, details of The Lovely Bones are still with me. So when I saw The Bright Forever in a used bookstore, I snagged it.

Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever (2006) has, as you can see in these two pictures, a cover not far off from Sebold’s. The plotline was also similar: a young girl (Martin’s is 9) disappears in the 1970s and her whole town is up in shambles searching for her and a molesting murderer.

Martin’s book may be truer to real life, with parents that blame themselves, questions of how it could have been avoided, and multiple - often varying - points of view of characters living in the moment. But with a touchy subject like child molestation and murder: Sebold creates an intriguing, non-threatening picture of the mess left behind. Martin puts together a creepy look with more focus on the perpetrator than the effected. Unfotunately for him, Martin’s also gets an “ick factor” simply because he is a man writing about lust over a little girl.

Both pulled me from page to page, both have stayed in my mind, but no one will be making a movie out of The Bright Forever.

A film adaptation of The Lovely Bones has been in talks for awhile, and is now being filmed with Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg as Susie’s parents, Susan Sarandon as her grandmother, and Irish actress Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon. Expect it theaters in 2009. Sebold’s third triumph-over-tragedy novel - The Almost Moon (2007) - is currently topping bestseller lists. Her first book was Lucky (1999) - a disturbingly accurate memoir of her own rape.

This was Martin’s second novel; he previously published Quakertown (2001) as well as a story collection titled The Least You Need to Know (1996) and two memoirs, From Our House (2001) and Turning Bones (2003). His latest is River of Heaven (2008).