After I read this book, I resolved never ever to read anything by Alice Sebold again.

This is a really terribly written novel. The concept is interesting, the main character is almost someone I could identify with, but the way it’s written is like cotton candy; it’s fluff, there’s no substance to the story and it seems sweet at the time but leaves a really awful aftertaste. There are very few books I have felt like I wasted my time reading, and some of my friends highly recommended I read The Lovely Bones, but it comes across something like a Readers Digest story expanded for YA publication; this would be fine, of course, if it didn’t try to pawn itself off as mature literature.

Really, read something by Yeats instead.