She is just plain bold when it comes to doing whatever she feels like, and she feels like doing the weirdest stuff ever. I read the last thirty pages on the train this morning, and couldn’t stop a few outbursts: “Oh, no she didn’t!” I’d say, talking to Alice Sebold and her crazy ways. Since there’s no plot, the ending is just a bunch of weird stuff happening. Things change, and things often do, but there is no forward movement and certainly no building of suspense. The characters get older and keep bumping into each other. But what do the characters want? What drives the story forward? Nothing. A girl dies and watches her family from heaven. Sebold has the same problem: her book is a really long situation. I’ll never forget my first workshop with Brady Udall, in which he threw my story onto the table and said, “This isn’t a story, Sarah, it’s a situation.” And as much as I despaired when I got home, he was right. You know, that thing that books are supposed to have. I’ve read MadLibs that make more sense than that. She asked for coffee and toast in a restaurant and buttered it with her tears.” Really? She buttered the coffee and toast with her tears? Or this one, this time about someone’s heart: “Her heart, like a recipe, was reduced.” What the hell?Īnd here’s my favorite eye description in the book: “Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.” That’s right. Don’t believe me? Try this sentence: “Her eyes were like flint and flower petals.” Or this one: “The tears came like a small relentless army approaching the front lines of her eyes. A tell-tale way to spot a weak writer? They can’t stop weirdly describing people’s eyes. From bad description to horrible grammar to utterly confusing metaphors, Sebold covered it all. It is filled with some of the worst sentence-level writing that I have ever encountered. Here are some of my gripes, problems and issues that we can hopefully use to prevent something like this from ever happening again to us, our children, or our children’s children:
If it serves any use at all, it might be a perfect guide on how not to write a book. How could this have ever possibly been popular? Is it for the same reason that the song “My Humps” hit number one? I mean, I don’t technically believe in burning books, but this novel really got me thinking. It is truly a black, black tragedy that the words in this book were placed in that particular order, published, and distributed. The Lovely Bones has got to be the most baffling, poorly written, jaw-droppingly bad book that I have ever set my eyes on.
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