Meet our narrator, Susie “like the fish” Salmon (1.1). She’s been dead since December 6, 1973. She was fourteen years old when she was raped and murdered by her neighbor.

Although she is a fairly minor character in the book, Flora Hernandez is a key catalyst for Susie to release some of her pain following her murder in The Lovely Bones. Like Susie, Flora Hernandez is one of the girls that serial rapist and killer George Harvey murdered.

Harvey cuts up young Suzie’s body with a knife. He dismembers her in order to hide her body. The rape and murder of Suzie is made all the more horrific by the dismembering of her body, as Harvey slices her body with a knife.

Abigail Suzanne

George Harvey

Why did Mr Harvey kill Susie? Harvey had only wanted to touch her, but he killed her when she screamed. He left her body to decompose in an old basement. She was waiting for her father to close up their shop when Harvey kidnapped, raped and strangled her.

Susie’s body was cut into pieces and put into a garbage bag, then taken to the murderer’s house, where it left a stain on the floor. The murderer then placed Susie’s body in a metal safe, locked it, and paid a small fee to discard it in a sinkhole outside of town.

On December 6, 1973, he lures his 14-year-old neighbor Susie Salmon into an underground “clubhouse” he had built in the woods near his house, and rapes and murders her once she is in his power. He then dismembers her body, puts her remains in a safe and dumps them in a landfill.

Susie Salmon from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Although no one would ever wish for Susie Salmon’s character to be inspired by real events, it is based on a young girl’s murder in Norristown, Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered in the first chapter. She narrates the novel from Heaven, witnessing the events on earth and experiencing hopes and longings for the everyday things she can no longer do.

14-year-old

In short, The Lovely Bones is not a true story, but it was influenced by true life events: the author, Alice Sebold was brutally raped in a tunnel while she was in college. Once she reported the crime, the police told her of another rape that had happened in the same tunnel in which the victim had been dismembered.

Yes — kind of. The afterlife storyline, in which Susie watches her family from purgatory, is not real. But the original author of the book, Alice Sebold, stated that the story was partially based on a real rape and murder of a young girl in Norristown, Pennsylvania, who was kidnapped from her parents in the 1970s.

In Jackson’s simplified, sweetened, and CGI-besotted telling, “The Lovely Bones” is a sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens. (There’s no indication that Susie gets raped, as she does in the novel, and her murder occurs off screen.)