Lovely.

On the way home from Los Angeles last night, I finished reading The Lovely Bones. I started this extraordinary book on the plane ride to LA, and was eagerly anticipating the home-bound reading time.

No, "eagerly" is the wrong word. This was one of the most painful, wrenching novels I have ever read. Though I loved it, I also suffered through it, word by word and page upon page, fighting back tears, hands quite literally shaking. I finished the book with less than thirty minutes of flight time left. I had another book with me, but when I closed The Lovely Bones, I turned off the small light over my seat, dropped my head into my hands, closed my aching eyes, and tried to let go of the churning emotions inside me.

Books often touch me deeply, but for reasons I do not fully understand, this book left me drained, exhausted, shivering. The editorial reviews linked above scarcely capture the power of Alice Sebold's prose, each phrase seemingly scraped from the depths of her soul and written in blood. "Haunting and heartbreaking" it is, but far, far more so than mere adjectives can convey. At moments, I almost wanted to tear open the door to the plane and throw the book into the wind, as the grief left in the wake of narrator Susie's murder seeped like a red-wine stain into the hearts and minds and pores of those left behind her. Even more painful was to see Susie watching from her own heaven as her family disintegrates and her siblings and peers grow up and experience all that was stolen from her.

Perhaps because I spend my days focusing on the injustices wrought upon the murderers, I could hardly bear to imagine the pain of the murder victims, both dead and living. Or perhaps because my emotions seem close to the surface these days, Sebold's wrenching tale scratched just deep enough to strike a nerve. But for whatever reason, this was one of the most powerful novels I have experienced in a long, long time. In the wake of its reading, I feel scarred, yet somehow cleansed.