Not Exactly A Lucky Charm (Lucky)

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a beautifully-written, yet harrowing novel that chronicles the brutal rape and murder of 14-year-old Susie Salmon. As Susie watches from heaven as her loved ones come to terms with her death, she slowly begins to grasp the purpose and meaning of her life.

Alice Sebold's Lucky is a well-written, yet painful memoir that chronicles the brutal beating and rape of Sebold herself. Nearly 20 years on, as she remembers the incident and her attempts to bring her rapist to justice, Sebold slowly begins to come to terms with her rape and how it has affected her life.

It is glaringly obvious how similar these two pieces of work are and, indeed, how drastically Sebold's real-life experiences affect her fiction. But where The Lovely Bones is emotional and sprirtual, Lucky is more matter-of-fact. It adeptly timetables key events, details legal processes and describes Sebold's loved ones' reactions to her ordeal, but is less convincing in revealing the author's personal sentiments about the incident.

That's not to say that Lucky isn't insightful or important. Indeed, Sebold paints the ugliness of rape in a way only the victim of this atrocity could. However, given my previous knowledge of the author, I was perplexed by the detachment of the memoir--Sebold's strength and optimism seems almost sacrilegious.

Perhaps this is the by-product of re-living the experience after so many years, or maybe it is simply that Sebold's nonfiction voice is incomparable to her fiction voice. Yet, I can't escape the idea that Sebold's brilliant debut novel gave her the ability to fictionalise her own experiences in a way that allowed her to step back and vocalise her anguish. And if this is the case, then Alice Sebold is, indeed, extremely lucky.

A Concise, Comforting Look at Heaven (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

I have always wanted to read Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie but have somehow never gotten around to it (poor excuse, I know). My high school English teacher frequently talked about Albom so when I spotted a copy of his The Five People You Meet in Heaven I decided I owed it to her to give him a try.

Eddie is a lonely war veteran who dies saving a little girl from a falling cart. This novel is a look into his immediate afterlife and the five people he meets there. It theorises the premise that once we pass on, we will all meet our own five people (sometimes loved ones, sometimes strangers) who will explain our lives to us and show us just how connected we all are.

Both the writing and the argument reminded a lot of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones--another book I would highly recommend. The novel itself is fairly short, but it well-structured and beautifully written. Its message certainly resonated with me so I can only imagine how powerful and comforting it is for readers who recently lost loved ones.

This is yet another book that has been made into a film (or rather a TV movie), featuring Jon Voight and Jeff Daniels. But it looks to be quite a good adaptation as Albom wrote the teleplay and it scores quite highly (7.4) on IMDb.

I think I will force myself to 'get around' to Tuesdays with Morrie now. Albom is a gifted writer and his Heaven is one I would be quite comfortable going to one day.