It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from a personal heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death.

The novel's title is taken from a quotation at the novel's conclusion, when Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death: These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone.

George Harvey, her 36-year-old neighbor, a bachelor who builds doll houses for a living, persuades her to look at an underground kid's hideout he constructed in the field.

Believing Harvey is returning to destroy evidence, Jack runs out to confront him, armed with a baseball bat.

While Jack recovers from knee replacement surgery, Susie's grieving mother, Abigail, begins an affair with the widowed Det.

Trying to help her father prove his suspicions, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a diagram of the underground den.

Abigail's mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to care for Lindsey and Buckley (the younger brother).

The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness for her having abandoned the family for most of his childhood.

While stalking a young woman in New Hampshire, Harvey is hit on the shoulder by an icicle and falls to his death down a snow-covered slope into the ravine below.

"This is a high-wire act for a first novelist, and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance", wrote Katherine Bouton in The New York Times Book Review.

[6] Ali Smith of The Guardian wrote that The Lovely Bones "is a determined reiteration of innocence, a teeth-gritted celebration of something not dismembered or shattered at all, but continuous: the notion of the American family unit, dysfunctional, yes, but pure and good nonetheless.

"[7] The Observer's Philip Hensher considers that the novel was "very readable" but "ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy".

[8] Sebold has said that she did not intend the book to be religious, "but if people want to take things and interpret them, then I can't do anything about that.

In the same interview, regarding Susie's heaven, he said the movie version would endeavor to make it appear "somehow ethereal and emotional, but it can't be hokey".

It was met with mixed reviews, but garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Tucci), and other praise for his and Ronan's acting.