Most books fit easily into categories: John Grisham writes legal thrillers, Mickey Spillane is the king of the detective novel, Stephen King writes horror that sometimes keeps you up at night, etc. But the Sunday Book Club’s second monthly feature, Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” defies all categorization.

Sebold

It’s a little bit of everything — part ghost story, part thriller, part coming-of-age story, part love story. Publishers Weekly says that “Sebold has taken a grim, media-exploited subject and fashioned from it a story that is both tragic and full of light and grace.”

Sebold’s unique storyline and finely crafted prose have propelled her to the tops of numerous best-sellers lists and into the spotlight of various monthly book clubs.

The story begins with the violent rape and murder of the narrator, 14-year-old Susie Salmon, as she cuts across a frozen cornfield on her way home from school. The remainder of the novel weaves together several threads: Susie’s life in her “personalized” heaven, the struggles of her brother, sister and parents as they try to cope with her death, her haunting of a schoolmate named Ruth, the path of her killer and the efforts of the detective who tries to bring him to justice.

Susie Salmon is a wonderful narrator and a true example of Sebold’s writing skill. She is everything one expects a 14-year-old to be: a romantic, wistful and sometimes immature girl who wishes desperately after her death to return to the loving circle of her family.

Susie’s heaven is an odd mixture of things she enjoyed on Earth, and things she wished for — and she has an endless amount of time to watch the lives of her loved ones unfold below. A murdered social worker, Franny, becomes Susie’s mentor in heaven, explaining to her where the boundaries are and how things work. Often, Franny’s presence makes Susie miss her mother even more:

On the way back to the duplex each night I would pass under old- time street lamps that I had once seen in a play of Our Town. The globes of light hung down in an arc from an iron post. I had remembered them because when I saw the play with my family, I thought of them as giant, heavy berries full of light. I made a game in heaven of positioning myself so that my shadow plucked the berries as I made my way home.

After watching Ruth one night I met Franny in the midst of all this. The square was deserted, and leaves began to swirl around in an eddy up ahead. I stood and looked at her — at the laugh lines that were clustered near her eyes and mouth.

“Why are you shivering?” Franny asked.

And though the air was damp and chilly I could not say that that was why.

“I can’t help thinking of my mother,” I said.

Franny took my left hand in both of hers and smiled.

I wanted to kiss her lightly on the cheek or have her hold me, but instead I watched her walk off in front of me, saw her blue dress trail away. I knew that she was not my mother; I could not play pretend.

Catching a killer

After her death, Susie’s family begins to drift apart: her sister Lindsey at first is angry at having to live in the shadow of her murdered sister, her father becomes obsessed with the neighbor he believes to be Susie’s killer, and her mother feels smothered by the family. Her brother Buckley, who is 4 as the story begins, claims to see Susie’s ghost.

Of course, the question that looms over the entire story is whether Susie’s killer, whose identity is revealed in the first few pages, will ever be caught. Sebold’s ending is a bit of a surprise, albeit a neatly wrapped one.

Sebold’s book is a sure fit for those who enjoy the dreamy prose and magic realism of writers such as Alice Hoffman. But “The Lovely Bones” is a book that has something to offer almost any reader and it presents an interesting perspective on our concepts of death and heaven. “The truth was very different from what we learned in school,” Susie observes. “The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.”

Sunday Book Club readers are invited to post their comments on “The Lovely Bones” in our Web forum at www.sundaybookclub.com. Readers can also mail comments to Sunday Book Club, 1001 Virginia St. E., Charleston, WV 25301.

To contact staff writer Regina Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.