![]() ![]() “During the seemingly endless Independence Day week in July, we were all trapped in an eight-man cell and locked in with no outside at all for several days. Then I wrote this brief review of it in a 2017 post: So I brought it back from the prison library one day and read it, stunned and mesmerized, over one long weekend in 2017. One described it as “mesmerizing.” Katherine Bouton at the New York Times Book Review wrote that Alice Sebold treated an “almost unthinkable subject with a kind of mysterious grace.” One friend told me that she found healing and peace in it. How could any writer take such a story and turn it into something redemptive? I had friends whose life experiences included sexual trauma and some of them also read The Lovely Bones on my recommendation. I was skeptical, but at the time I was also seeking a breakthrough for my friend. Alice Sebold has done something miraculous here.” The book begins with more horror than you can imagine, but closes with more beauty than you could hope for. “Don’t start The Lovely Bones unless you can finish it. But it was ultimately this review by Ron Charles in the Christian Science Monitor that caused me to take up The Lovely Bones: His soul had nonetheless been nearly slain and I was his last hope to restore that too. He did not die, but sometimes he wished he had. For 15 years I prayed and hoped to restore for my friend some of the humanity, safety, trust, and well being that had been taken from him. I was living in prison with someone who had been such a victim. I suppose that was partly out of empathy. I was in equal measure horrified and hopeful. A New York Times Book Review described it as the story of a 14-year-old girl, a victim of rape and murder, who narrates the tale from Heaven while pondering the fate of her family, her friends, and her killer. ![]() I cannot fathom today what exactly brought me to read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. These books and writers took me out of prison for journeys into history, adventure, espionage, mythology, Sacred Scripture, and, in that last on my list, a journey into a traumatized writer’s soul. Michael Gaitley for The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, Tom Clancy for The Hunt for Red October (and 22 other titles in his Jack Ryan Series), and Alice Sebold for The Lovely Bones. Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings, Patrick O’Brian for Master and Commander (and 21 other titles in his Aubrey-Maturin Series), Taylor Caldwell for Dear and Glorious Physician, Fr. ![]() I called it “The Stuck Inside Literary Award.”Īmong the great writers I cited were Graham Greene for The Power and the Glory, J.R.R. Some years back, in an earlier version of this blog, I had a practice of honoring writers whose works carried me through long holiday weekends of extended confinement. Acclaimed author Alice Sebold was traumatized by a violent rape at age 18 and then again 40 years later when she learned that an innocent man went to prison for it. ![]()
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