Though Sebold's scenes of the family's grief and mourning of Susie Salmon are convincing and often wrenching, her depiction of heaven as a subdivision, where everyone has their own place and intake worker, seems silly and false. Sebold's setting up rules for the place (the dead cannot interact with the living) and then breaking them twice (the final time a teenaged deflowering) is artistically flabby and dishonest.Like most bestsellers, this book has been praised far beyond its merit.