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The Lovely Bones Reading Response

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The Lovely Bones Reading Response
Title: The Lovely Bones
Author: Alice Sebold
Genre: Extended Written Text (Novel)

Interviewing Joey Nathan about the novel.

Dominique: Who introduced you to this novel? Or how did you come across it?
Joey: Well I had seen the film not long after it was released and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I decided to get the book out at the town library. It was one of the first books I have read that deals with the aftermath of death.

Dominique: What’s it about exactly?
Joey: Well basically a teenage girl named Susie is raped and then murdered and goes to heaven and watches down upon her family, and their life without her.

Dominique: What attracted you to it? What really drew you in?
Joey: Just the fact it was something different, it was emotional and dealed with themes I had never really touched before.

Dominique: What type of themes do you mean?
Joey: Well one that stood out strongly would be grief…

Dominique: Define what you mean?
Joey: (sighs) I was about to… Well there were two different griefs within the novel. The grief of the family and friends of Susie. But also her own grief being apart from the ones she loves and cares about, watching their sadness would be heartbreaking. The fact that our country experiences death of teenagers, in fact New Zealand has the second highest rate of teenage death in the Western world is also pretty sad. All the families that have to go through all that is terrible.

Dominique: So you see some things in this novel that appear in the physical world of nowadays?
Joey: Yes some things fully apply. Death, rape, all those kind of things definitely happen.

Dominique: What techniques are used? Characterization… Structure…
Joey: Well I actually did enjoy Susie’s character, she’s only 14 so young and quite innocent. It’s quite tragic how her life is taken before she even got to experience a thing. She is pained by what happened to her even in death, but still she expresses love for her family and friends whom she
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