On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey.

Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class.... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."

This is one of those books I knew I should have already read. Everyone had been talking about it. I knew it would be a good read and worth the time, but somehow it hadn't made it to the top of my pile on the nightstand. Besides, who wants to read about a fourteen-year-old girl being raped and murdered? As a mother of a teenager, it was a topic I wanted to avoid.

But from the beginning of the story I was mesmerized. The victim, Susie Salmon, like the fish, as the author says, tells the story beginning with her brutal demise and carries on throughout the years watching her family, friends and strangers from her version of heaven. She becomes the proverbial "fly on the wall" and shares all that she sees. In the beginning we eavesdrop on the mind of a child as she becomes aware of the danger she is in and that she won't be surviving. As a parent, it is not easy to read, but the scene is so well written that you will continue to turn the pages even as your stomach turns.

Sebold creates a new version of heaven with roommates and different sections to live in. We learn that it is not a perfect place giving us all that we desire. It really made me think about what it might be like and whether members of my own family were above watching me as I stroll through my own story.

The villain, Mr. Harvey, is known from the beginning of the story. Susie not only follows her family from above, but she follows her killer's movements. It felt like being in the mind of a pedophile watching the deliberateness of his actions and the incredible patience he displayed as he waited, sometimes for years, for his next victim. He was truly the man down the street that nobody suspected expect the father overwhelmed with grief. Shivers raced up my spine when I read "He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child."

As we might expect, the family takes Susie's death very hard. The gift of this novel is that it shares how each member of the family reacts and internalizes this horrible event. No one is the same and as we might imagine, the death of a child is not the end of tragedy for the Salmons.

Even school friends and their reactions are woven into the plot line. Ruth, a mere acquaintance takes on a major role as the story develops. There is the Indian boy, Ray, who is at first accused of the crime and his mother, Runa Singh, whose lives become intermingled in the Salmon's as the book develops. She is almost as interesting as the saucy, often soused, grandma who becomes the glue of the family.

The writer's style is simple and yet eloquent. She delves into Susie's desire and attainment of her first kiss. Prior to her death, that was the only sexual experience Susie had had. She goes on to watch the interactions between those left behind and even in death she is able to blossom into a woman in an amazing scene that I won't reveal. The author explains the urges of one character as "...a desire beyond the sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocus-like lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence."

Not only do we learn how interdependent people are, but we also learn that usually people can overcome most anything. It doesn't happen easily or even the way we might expect. But it happens, over time. And just as Susie learns in "The Lovely Bones," we too understand that connections with others can be miraculous.