THE LOVELY BONES (Alice Sebold) - February 14/10

Hmm. This one was a little frustrating. I was definitely enjoying it for the first half, although Sebold's reliance on overly flowery prose is a little irritating. But once the story zips ahead through time and we're asked to spend more and more time with characters we don't really care about (ie Ruth), my interest seriously began to wane. Maybe it's my own fault for expecting something that Sebold isn't interested in delivering - ie a linear look at a family attempting to cope with the loss of one of their own - but I just found the latter half of the novel seriously anticlimactic and often flat-out boring. **1/2 out of ****