the lovely bones

I'm curious as to how people are going to compare the interconnections between the world of the living and the world of the dead posited in The Lovely Bones as compared to the more recent Forgiving Ararat (Gita Nazareth/www.forgivingararat.com).

In Forgiving Ararat, we meet the main character Brek Cuttler immediately after her death, sitting in a deserted train station that we later learn is the heart of Nazareth’s imagined afterlife world of Shemaya. Shemaya is a world that alights on our greatest hopes for our future beyond death, yet at the same time is rooted in prominent vestiges of the human condition. Beyond Nazareth’s perfectly crafted reimagining of what life after death might be like, what makes Shemaya so utterly engaging is where it allows us to go. While it is grounded in real-life lessons about the guilts and tensions that stay with us and our descendents long after a traumatic event has passed, it also gives us a unique portal through which to explore broader basic human themes about the pursuit of justice and the embracing of love as we experience them in our world today.

Both of these are enlightening explorations on what happens to us when we die and how we should remember to live. I'm interested to see what parallels are drawn between the two