“The Lovely Bones” is an unsettling, haunting look at the violent death and after life of a child.

A first person account of the murder of 14-year-old Suzy Salmon, the initial pages of “The Lovely Bones” find Suzy adapting to her new existence in heaven — a place that is different for everyone.

There are goal posts and soccer fields, a high school and glamorous magazines in Suzy’s heaven.

She even shares a condo with another recent inductee into heaven, a girl named Holly.

I picked up the book in 2004 and reread it after I saw a review of the movie last December.

I recalled several things from my first encounter with “The Lovely Bones.”

I remember crying until I couldn’t see the words on the pages as Suzy talks about her death — how the murderer Mr. Harvey stifles Suzy’s cries for help with a hat her mother made for her, how he violates her, forces her to say she loves him and then kills her with a knife.

Harvey is a remorseless husk, a vile character who feeds on the suffering of women and little girls.

It’s horrible stuff made more despicable by the fact that there are real Mr. Harveys in the world.

Alice Sebold’s use of imagery and the abstract make the book more like a poem than a work of fiction.

Sometimes, the subtle words work like magic as they do when Jack Salmon explains Suzy’s death to her little brother Buckley using the pewter playing pieces of a Monopoly set.

At other times, I found myself wishing the author would just say what she means.

But Sebold pulls no punches.

Her characters come through as vulnerable individuals whose thoughts Suzy can feel as she watches earth from a gazebo in heaven.

And they are a mixed up lot.

Lonely Ruth — chastened for sketching nude women in her art class — is coming to terms with the fact that she “likes girls.”

Suzy’s mother Abigail is drawn into a brief affair with Detective Len Fenerman who is investigating Suzy’s death and getting nowhere.

Suzy’s sister Lindsay rebels against the stigma of always being known as the “dead girl’s sister.”

The monster Mr. Harvey relives and enjoys the deaths of his victims.

Throughout the book, Suzy is stuck in time, watching her loved ones and recalling every incident in her brief life in the past tense.

My daughter, Kirsten who also read the book, said those experiences and Suzy’s interactions with friends and family make the story even sadder.

I agree.

Also, people of faith may not care for the vision of heaven Sebold depicts.

For one thing, there is no God in Suzy Salmon’s heaven.

Heaven is an empty place where time stops for the dead, and existence is made up of the things — but not the people — the dead loved while they were on earth.

Suzy can still sit in a swing, talk to others in heaven, crack a joke.

But the thing she wants most is to live again — something she can never do.

Suzy must be content to sit in the gazebo and watch the world.

She sees her memorial, hears her friends gossiping about her death, watches the painfully slow police investigation that turns up nothing.

She is omniscient, yet powerless.

Suzy cannot make geraniums bloom.

She cannot comfort her grieving father or touch Ray Singh — the boy she loved.

She cannot point investigators in the right direction.

I was impressed by Sebold’s eye for detail.

Suzy experiences love, disbelief, loss, grief and finally healing through the people she loved.

She can see her father, her sister, her mother, her brother, her friends, her grandmother, but she cannot interact with them.

Suzy’s heaven sounds like a lonely place to me. With the exception of the family dog, Holiday, no one she loves joins her there.

Her fractured family does find a sort of peace in the end.

Jack Salmon falls into despair and finds redemption through Suzy’s little brother Buckley.

Her mother runs away to California and returns to save Suzy’s father.

Her sister grows up and marries and has a daughter she names Abigail Susan.

I wanted revenge for Suzy, but as is often the case in life, justice is cruelly slow.

“The Lovely Bones” is a beautifully-told, heartbreaking story that, in the end, left me cold.