The Lovely Bones Book vs. Movie Review

The Lovely Bones book cover

I am a firm believer that the book is always better than the movie/tv series. I could point you to multiple examples where the characters were botched on screen, or plot holes prevailed. The statement that the book is better than the movie usually holds true

However, with the increased use of streaming services and the increased utilization of published book material being pulled into the movie/tv world, more and more of our familiar stories are being put to the screen, and hence being put to the test. Some pass: despite some alterations and plot changes, the story and characters remain relatively the same, which bolsters excitement from the fan base. However, others don't, and screenplays that drastically alter the storyline leave fans wishing for a do-over.

I definitely have some conflicted feelings regarding The Lovely Bones and its book-to-movie adaptation.

I really did like the book. It's not my favorite, or by any means the best book I've ever read, but it was enjoyable and refreshing from what I usually read.

The Lovely Bones movie poster

If I had to choose, though, between the book and the movie, I would always choose the book. In this case, that statement applies. Even though The Lovely Bones movie was great, it left out a lot of parts that, for me, just made the book more special.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is about a 14 year old girl named Susie Salmon who was murdered in 1973 and is told from her perspective as she watches down from "heaven." Susie watches as her family and friends grieve and continue on without her, all the while wishing they would find her murderer. It was an interesting concept, and my overall reaction to the book is that it could have been written better (the book was 328 pages of dense paragraphs) but the ingenuity of the story is what allowed me to push through.

I watched the movie and my reaction to that was a bit different. I felt that it was very well done, and it was close to the book in all the important ways except for a key few that I thought characterized the characters in a way that movie-goers would never recognize if they didn't read the book.

Susie

Let me explain. It did not bother me that some of the events were placed out of order, because the filmmakers did it in a way that made sense for an adaptation What did bother me, was how the book spanned out over the course of a few years (so the sister was younger than Susie when Susie was murdered, but by the end of the book, the sister was married and had a kid), but the movie condensed it all within a year or two after Susie's death.

Imagine all that decision takes away.

I loved watching the brother and sister grow up, grappling with normal life but also with the loss of their sister. I liked the problems that arose out of that, but considering the movie condensed the timeline, it cut out the supposedly irrelevant bits that humanized the siblings and their struggles.

Susie, her dad, sister Lindsey and brother
Buckley dumping their fridge into
 the sinkhole

I don't want to give too much away about the book or the movie while giving my opinions on the adaptation. I just want readers to be made aware that the timeline difference. There is a sort of magic involved in watching the kids grow up that movie-goers won't get to experience, which would have been magic I'd have thought should have been involved in the adaptation in the first place.

Let's move onto what the movie did right. In the book, Susie is already dead, and a lot of her memories are spliced in between scenes in her heaven. In the movie, all of the memories the filmmaker's found relevant (all of which I agreed with) were put in the front and we didn't learn Susie was dead until maybe thirty minutes through. I liked this, because it didn't leave a lot of room for confusion.

Lindsey, inside the house she's broke into,
is alerted that someone is downstairs

I also liked that they pulled direct quotes from the book into the movie. Who doesn't love that? I also liked how the last five or so minutes of the movie were pretty much the last five or so pages of the book. If you want to know what I mean by that, read the book and watch the movie!

(*I made notes on differences between the book and the movie while watching the movie and I can't believe how much was different, but still somehow the same! I'm never going to be able to write all of this!*)

We talked in class about how some characters were changed or melded together or taken out completely. There was a bit of all of that in there. Ruth, for one, had a different home than the one in the book, but it made sense for the movie and saved a lot of explaining. There was a character that already existed in the book, Holly, who was sort of melded into someone else, and I was shocked when that was revealed in the movie, but I actually really liked it. There was another character in the book, Susie's "death counselor" (or the person who welcomed her into "heaven", I guess is another way of putting it) who was taken out completely, but I didn't mind that very much because she didn't have a big role in the book to start out with.

A few closing thoughts:

Quote from The Lovely Bones

• I thought it was interesting that the movie didn't go into extreme detail about how Susie's murderer killed her. I already knew (having read the book), but all movie goers knew was that Susie was murdered and the detectives couldn't find her body.
• I liked how every character was a bit different in the movie from their book self, except for Susie. Even if the storyline changed a bit, along with the characters that still lived on earth, I liked how Susie's dreams and wants still stayed the exact same.
• Susie's "heaven" is very perfect in the movie, but in the book, there was a very different concept. In the movie, her heaven was so perfect it was unreal, but in the book, it just seemed like another ordinary world with anything Susie wanted.
• The parents' relationship and how it played out in the movie was WAY different than what happened in the book.
• The scene on when Lindsey breaks into the house is exactly like how I imagined it in the book and kept the same heart-racing pace it was told in in the book.
• I thought it was interesting how the movie seemed to centrally focus on the family and what they did after Susie's death because the book shifted focus between the family and Susie's friends. In the movie, Susie's friends, Ruth and Ray, are more pushed to the side as if they were less important, but that's not exactly true.

A grieving Ruth and Ray

These were pretty much all the similarities and differences I found that I thought wouldn't give away plot points or the end of the story. I wrote a whole lot more in notes than all of this, but I didn't want to spoil anything, so I think everyone should just read this book and watch the movie so I can share everything about what I thought!

Overall, the book had more than the movie had to offer (conflicted feelings aside), but the movie was great in the sense that it sped up the book a little bit and kept all the essential parts of the story in tact (which is all we can really ask for these days).

If you want a book-to-movie recommendation and aren't put off by a slightly darker story, pick up The Lovely Bones today and let me know what you think. Don't forget to read the book before watching the movie, though - you won't regret it!