There always seems to be something extremely upsetting when we hear about the murder of a child. When we hear about tragedies of this nature through news or television shows, one can only imagine the pain and grief the family is going through. No matter how heartbreaking we find the situation we hear about to be, we know that our grief is just a small fraction compared to the grief the entire family and those closet to the deceased child are feeling. In the novel, "The Lovely Bones" Alice Sebold takes us into the lives of the Salmon family, who have just experienced the loss of their fourteen-year-old relative Susie. She not only illustrates for us how the family grieves in their own separate ways, but how Susie struggles in heaven to come to grips with her death and the pain she feels watching her family deal with this hardship without her help. The Salmon's were a typical American family that consisted of both parents and three children, fourteen-year-old Susie, thirteen-year-old Lindsey and three-year-old Buckley. On December 6, 1973, their lives unexpectedly change forever. While walking home from school, Susie happens upon a man from her neighborhood named Mr. Harvey. He lures Susie to his home where he eventually rapes and murders her. In great detail, Susie describes her horrible ordeal, "I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close" (12). After the brutal rape, with Mr. Harvey still lying on top of her, Susie realizes what will soon happen, "I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an
             animal already dying" (14). As time passes and Susie does not return home from school, her parents begin to worry. It is when Detective Len Fenerman explains to Mr. Salmon that they have found a body part, an elbow bone, that reality sets in and the possibility that Susie has been murdered arises. Th...