The Lovely Bones is a heartbreaking story pretty much from beginning to end. I saw the trailer for the movie first, then a friend lent me the book. I read it over a weekend. I thought it might be hard to get into the novel, at first. Instead the author provides a pretty intense hook at the very beginning, so readers would feel not only a compulsion to continue reading, but a responsibility - to honor the main characters life and death. To "watch" a family go through the heartache of loss - not only physical loss, but emotional, as well - creates this sense of connection, of belonging to their loss.