Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If any of you out there are contemplating reading this novel because you've read all the critical raves, and noted that the thing has been on the bestseller lists for 197 weeks, please, do yourself a favor, and stay away from this one. It is an utterly unoriginal, hackneyed piece of sentimental drivel, bound to burden you with a dull headache before even a third of the way through. As everybody knows, the story is written in the first person by a dead fourteen-year old girl, a victim of a rape/murder, who now resides in heaven. Nobody likes it there. Heaven isn't that much different from earth, wouldn't you know, except you can pretty much get anything you wish for. Our heroine still gets to go to high-school, but yippee! only art class, and, "the boys did not pinch our backsides and tell us we smelled." Really. There is really not much to do in heaven except sit on your veranda and watch your family or anyone else on earth if you want. She watches her Dad smash up his model ships in helpless anger. She watches her little sister act tough in front of her moronic principal. She watches her father distract her four-year old brother by telling him that he will take the kid to the zoo: "Buckley heard the word zoo and all that it meant--which to him was largely Monkeys!" Yep. Monkeys. Capital M. Exclamation point. She reminisces about her mother, pregnant with her, (how would she know this?), sneaking bites from macaroons in the downstairs bathroom. She, "ate all she wanted, rubbing her belly and saying, `Thank you baby,' as she dribbled chocolate on her breasts." Thank you baby. Rubbing her belly. Chocolate on her breasts. She teases her brother about her sister being, "snooty-wooty." "I . . . burrowed into his stomach with my head, butting him and saying `snooty-wooty' over and over until the trills of laughter . . ." God almighty, do I have to go on? Her sister is really smart, don't you know. Her would-have-been boyfriend is very smart too, of course, and even has an English accent. Not only that, but her would-have-been best friend is ALSO very smart; so very, very smart--and talented--that the teachers don't mind if she skips class because the poor dumb bunnies are embarrassed by her. The murderer is a poor, lonely, single, non-descript male, and he's not only a murderer, but a serial murderer. What a surprise. He makes her tell him that she loves him before he takes the knife to her white skin. Ooh. But he gets it eventually. Yay! The police are very diligent and serious but they just can't seem to figure out anything. No clues wander up to them and grab them by the lapels and smack them in the face, even though our heroine was killed less than a hundred yards from school, less than a hundred yards from home, and less than a hundred yards from the murderer's home. What to do? But at least there's the grim, sympathetic detective, who really, really cares. He cares so much that he overlooks the most obvious place in town that a murderer would dispose of evidence, a place everyone seems to know about EXCEPT for the sympathetic detective. But enough of this. The book is terrible. It should be taught in college as an example of how NOT to write fiction. Indeed, it's the kind of thing one would expect to find in the "required reading" section of the library in the hot place.