Somehow I got my hands on this book when I was eleven. Not sure it was something my middle school library should have offered - at least not without someone to talk about the dark themes that eleven-year-olds might not completely understand. As a preteen, I found this book absolutely horrifying and simultaneously fascinating. I couldn't read it fast enough. Between this novel and a Mary Higgins Clark novel I read around the same time, the mystery/suspense genre had me hooked. 
 I have a slightly more well-rounded view of the book now. At 11, I thought Susie was stupid when (view spoiler)[she came back to earth via Ruth and spent her whole time... having sex with her old crush? Okayyyyy... I still boys had cooties so I more or less skimmed the weird sex bits. As an adult, that scene still stands out to me as a huge problem - is Ruth consenting to this sex? It sure doesn't seem like it - I'm not sure she even knows what happened. Isn't this a book about how bad rape is? It seemed like an odd choice on the part of the author (If you haven't read user Seth Hahne's review of this book, you should. He writes about this so much more eloquently than me). (hide spoiler)] The characters don't seem as thoroughly developed as they could be - almost like the author wanted to write for a younger audience (like my eleven-year-old self), but the sex at the end was so off-putting for me at that age that I'm not sure if Sebold wanted to market this as YA or adult. 
 I'd love to read Sebold's memoir - I have a feeling that it will be a much more compelling and touching work than this fictionalized account here.