Let me just start with stating the fact that this isn't a story about how a girl, Susie, gets brutally raped and murdered. It's a story about how the family and friends coped with their loss and moved on with their (very boring and ordinary) lives while Susie observed from her (boring) "heaven". 
 Now, what did I think of the book itself? 
 The first ten pages were captivating. The last 312 pages, however, was just pure torture (as in the why-am-I-still-reading-this-it's-so-boring kind of torture). 
 It takes real skill to turn a potentially amazing plot into the most boring book ever written. This entire novel could easily have been condensed into 50-100 pages. Instead, the author chose to fill the novel with 200 pages of irrelevant details and absurd similes (i.e. "I ran around my heaven like a chicken with it's head cut off" WTF?) 
 What bothered me the most though, was that this book was written in first person from Susie's point of view. While this was a great idea, it was poorly executed. When a book is written in first person, readers get the opportunity to see the world from the character's point of view and experience their thoughts and emotions as events unravel throughout the novel. But with The Lovely Bones, Susie explains in great detail what her friends and family are going through. By the end of the novel, we know the entire (boring) life story of Susie's mom, dad, sister, brother, grandma, potential boyfriend, boyfriend's mom, her friend Ruth, the police officer working on her case and her murderer and how they all coped with Susie's death... but we never know how Susie coped with her own death or what she feels when she observes her family and friends. It's as though the author has forgotten that she chose to write the book in first person. Sometimes, (it feels like) as an afterthought, the author would throw in a snippet that mentions that Susie is feeling happy, excited, or sad.