Reviewed by Michael Griffin

I didn’t get around to reading this book immediately, despite seeing almost everyone around me on public transportation, park benches and Starbucks shops reading it. The reason for my

reluctance was due to the subject matter, the death of someone, especially since my grandmother had passed away several weeks prior. My church youth network was going to start reading the book and discussing it in context to our faith, so I went ahead and bought the book. I'm glad that I did.

When I opened the book, it was with a palpable sense of dread, because I knew what was going to happen from hearing other people talk about it. I found it somewhat similar to watching footage of disastrous events on television that are shown endlessly. I keep hoping one time that the Challenger won’t explode; the planes will miss the World Trade Center. It never happens that way. And the sentences opening this book never change either.

The book begins with the protagonist, Susie Salmon ("Just like the fish," she says) walking home, and is told from her first-person point of view. The second sentence was short, stark, and hit me like a punch to the face: "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." The story starts quickly, in the first few pages, she recounts meeting the man who murders her and then tumbling into the state that she is now. After that, the book goes into a roller-coaster of emotion that had me alternately talking to the other people in the book in frustration at what they were missing in their search for Salmon’s killer to an ending that at first–reading to be truly heart-warming, while albeit being a bit hokey. In reflection though, the choices that Sebold makes Salmon make are quite a bit puzzling, but overall, Sebold's fresh writing voice carries it through, as she convincingly writes from the perspective of a precocious 14-year old.

Sebold’s vision of heaven will definitely differ from what many other people envision it to be, and one thing I had to do was turn off my own preconceived notion of heaven in order to derive full enjoyment of the novel. Not to spoil exactly what Salmon finds, but this is not the heaven of a long line waiting to enter the pearly gates. In her version of heaven, Salmon meets other people that have been killed by the same man that ended Salmon’s life, and she’s even given a mentor, to guide her through her new life in heaven.

In her new incarnation, Salmon is able to go to every place that she has been, from her home, where both her brother and sister are coping with her death in their own ways while her father makes finding his daughter’s killer an obsession, which drives her mother to an ill-conceived affair. The supporting cast of a psychic friend, a boyfriend who she wishes to have a first-kiss with to an overbearing, alcoholic grandmother rounds off an interesting group of people for Salmon to check in on. Naturally, she also checks in on the man that killed her, who happens to be her neighbor.

This is a simple book, with an unconvoluted plot and a cast of characters that are easy to remember, and is also a short book, weighing in at 288 pages, taking me a mere two days to read, but it has a lot of re-readability. The fact that this is Sebold’s first foray into fiction is astonishing too. I hope she doesn’t hit a sophomore slump like Donna Tartt.

The best thing about this book? It’s a book that my grandmother would have enjoyed as well, and we could have had discussions about it.