Title: Starts with a bang, ends with a whimper
Product review: THE LOVELY BONES certainly grabs one's attention in the first few pages. But the initial powerful surge of tension ultimately leads to a limp resolution, and in the final chapters the reader is mired in a morass of syrupy sentimentality. Sebold's "omniscient first person" viewpoint, morerover, though a novelty in the beginning, soon feels irritatingly manipulative; her narrator's ability not only to know the thoughts and feeling of all the other characters but, by the end of the book, actually to inhabit the body of one of those characters, is simply overkill. This was a promising but ultimately disappointing read.
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