The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones is a great novel, well most of it anyway. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and getting caught up in the realistic portrayal of the Salmon family truly feeling for their tragedy. Parts of it even made me cry just from the thought of someone losing a child in such a horrible fashion. But toward the end the book lost some of its umph. I think it's because it was told by the dead girl and it was hard to let her pass on as she watched her family grow older without her.

I thought the movie would be equally impressive. I was reading how it has a phenomenal director and how the girl chosen to play Suzie was perfect for the role. Perhaps those two things are true, but the movie fell extremely short of phenomenal. On a scale from one to ten I'd have to give it a three, and that's being generous.

The best parts of the book were missing from the movie. The parts that made the book so poignant and heart rendering were gone. In the place where these important factors that made the book a best seller were computer graphic images of the girls heaven. We could have used a little less graphic imagery and a lot more story.

I'm well aware how difficult it is to put a book into a movie without making the movie extremely long, but in this case they would have had a lot more storyline if they had forgone the imagery.

My best advice is to read the book and forget the movie.