The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones. Global comment:

Our dead narrator Susie is friendly, awkward and talented; she longs to become a photographer, attends her school film club (where she hates Lawrence Olivier’s “Othello”) and dreams about her first kiss with the new boy in her school, Ray. Jackson deliberately smears the camera with extra sugar, giving Susie’s life a “Brady Bunch”-like quality, not perfect, but damn near as close as a teenage girl is likely to get

This is a slice of middle class heaven Americana style. The house is full of books and the parents full of love. Even the Salmons’ boozy Grandmother is just a lush rather than a drunk. And when her brother Buckley chokes on a twig, Susie saves the day by doing a Steve McQueen in her dad’s Mustang, racing to the hospital. That and wearing her mum’s knitted hats are as bad as it gets for the Salmon family. As Susie says, “We weren’t those people, those unlucky people who bad things happen to them.”