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    A Study Guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"
    A Study Guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"
    A Study Guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"
    Ebook49 pages29 minutes

    A Study Guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A study guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 10, 2016
    ISBN9781535817820
    A Study Guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" - Gale

      1

      The Lovely Bones

      Alice Sebold

      2002

      Introduction

      In her first novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), Alice Sebold delves into the horror and trauma resulting from by the rape and murder of a young girl. The novel arose from Sebold's own experience with violence—her rape as an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Similar to her 1999 memoir, Lucky, which details her own rape, its psychological aftermath, and the arrest, trial, and conviction of the rapist, The Lovely Bones refuses to sanitize sexual violence. Yet the novel does not sensationalize violence either; instead, it offers the ordinariness of it. Both the setting in suburban Philadelphia, and the time period of the early 1970s, underscore Sebold's belief that no one is immune from violence; it touches everyone. More importantly, the story of Susie Salmon and her family exposes the way in which society marginalizes the victims of violence. The Lovely Bones becomes a study of the effects of violence, in this case rape and murder, not only on the victim, but on her family, friends, and community.

      The Lovely Bones does not focus on evil; it does not attempt to make sense of bad people or bad acts. Instead the novel investigates issues of loss and grief, life and death, identity and self, remembrance and forgetting, womanhood and motherhood, coming of age and rites of passage, and heaven and earth. The readers watch with Susie as her father, mother, sister, brother, and grandmother, as well as her middle school friends, her killer, and the lead detective on the case, confront similar issues in their attempts to understand their grief. While the novel raises many questions, it does not, in fact, answer all of them. Sebold examines traditional views, such as those about heaven, sexuality, and the place of women in American society, while simultaneously challenging those views.

      Author Biography

      Alice Sebold was born in 1963 and grew up in the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia. In her essay The Oddity of Suburbia, she confesses that she despised suburbia, but after living in both Manhattan and Southern California, she realiz[ed] … that within the suburban world of [her] upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world. Her novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), reflects her realization that suburbia can and does contain a bottomless well of narrative ideas. However, that realization did not occur until Sebold left Philadelphia.

      In 1981, as an eighteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University in New York, Sebold was severely beaten and raped. Rather than remain quiet about the incident, she was instrumental in the arrest, trial, and conviction of her assailant. While at Syracuse University, Sebold took writing classes with poet Tess Gallagher and fiction writer Tobias Wolff, both of whom encouraged her to remember and write about her rape. Sebold graduated from Syracuse in 1984 and entered, but did not complete, a master of fine arts degree program at the University

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