The Lovely Bones unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie can see her family and friends coping with her disappearance and eventually her death, as well as seeing her shameless murderer getting away with the crimes he committed and the unhappy detective working on her case. Sebold has made heaven a place that everybody has his or her own adaptation of. Susie's bears a resemblance to the athletic fields and scenery of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there were no teachers… We never had to go inside except for art class...The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."
The narrative voice is Susie. It is in 1st person and this allows the reader to recognize the thoughts and feelings of Susie. This makes the reader realise that it is not Susie’s family who are left alone but Susie herself. Watching her family move on with their lives without her increases her loneliness. However, the reader is definitely encouraged to make up his or her own mind about the characters. An example of this is when Susie’s mother walks out on the rest of the family. The reader is encouraged to decide whether this was a selfish act or if it was for the best.
Although set in heaven, the novel is more about life than death as it concerns the breaking up of a family and growing up and dealing with loss. The setting really holds Susie back. Although she can watch the living, she cannot help them. When her brother claims he has seen his murdered sister, Susie asked herself, “Had my brother really seen me somehow, or was he merely a little boy telling beautiful lies?" She longs to be able to communicate with the living and hates how she knows whom the murderer is but can’t point the police in the right direction. Just as this irritates Susie, it begins to annoy the reader, as they too want Mr George Harvey to be caught.
The main character, Susie, goes through a lot of changes throughout the novel. She starts off being very scared and confused – yet curious. It is this curiosity that puts her in danger. She is usually an intelligent person but she didn’t notice details at the time that she becomes aware of when she “watches” her murder again from heaven. During the novel Susie changes vastly and the reader becomes very close to her and relates to her throughout.
Susie is too busy watching her family to be bothered with the man who killed her. Because of this, the main technique Sebold uses to involve the reader is characterisation in the form of Susie’s mourning family. As soon as Susie first goes missing they start to drift apart and the closeness of the family disappears. It is made clear to the reader that cracks were already starting to appear in the parents’ relationship but it needed such an event as Susie’s disappearance to make it into an issue. Susie’s mother Abigail becomes the most distant from the rest of the family and eventually moves away to the other side of the country, following an affair between herself and the detective working on Susie’s murder case. This has an effect on Susie as moving away from the family means moving on and getting over Susie’s death. Susie begins to realise that although she wants her family to be happy, she wants to stay in their minds and not be forgotten.
Following this, her father suffers a heart attack which leaves Susie torn. If her father dies she knows he will be with her and she wants that more than anything. However if that does happen he is leaving Buckley, Susie’s younger brother, alone. She continues to watch from heaven as her mother at long last returns home when her father is discharged from the hospital. "I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I was waiting for," she asks herself, "for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone.”
As Susie continues to observe her family moving on, she realises that is was “no longer a Susie-fest on Earth”.
Susie’s sister Lindsey grows up, has a child, and gets married. Buckley stops seeing her and her year at school graduates. All the people Susie knew in her life are doing the things Susie never had the chance to do and never will.
In conclusion, the narrative voice, characterisation, and structure allow the reader to be pulled into the book and be involved in the central characters metaphorical journey to acceptance of her fate.