Paper of Many Parts: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
by Dana Smith

Summary Paragraph

The Lovely Bones conveys the thoughts and feelings of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon who, on a snowy December day on her way home from school was raped and murdered and goes to heaven. With a mixture of pain and compassion Susie watches on from her holy post as months pass without any clues to solving her murder, and her parents’ marriage begins to deteriorate, her sister begins replacing her heart with stone to reduce the pain, and her four-year-old brother just tries to figure out why his Susie hasn’t come home. The Lovely Bones is about Susie watching her family and friends try to heal and finding themselves again after a tragedy. It is a spellbinding novel about the restoration of a family after it has been devastated.

Character Descriptions

Susie Salmon: wistful, hopeful, trusting, curious

Jack Salmon: focused, determined, optimistic, strong

Lindsey Salmon: gifted, smart, daring, tough

Abigail Salmon: frustrated, broken, lonesome, wishful

Discussion/Essay Questions

1.   At the end if the book, Susie’s killer, George Harvey, is knocked into a ravine by an icicle and dies there. Do you think justice was served by his death or should he have lived so that when the case was solved he could be punished by the law? Give reasons for your answer.

2.   The Lovely Bones portrays heaven as a place that is whatever you make it; Susie always longed to go to Fairfax High so Fairfax High is right across from her house in heaven and she always loved the neighbor’s gazebo and so she has one also. Do you agree with this depiction of heaven or do you see it another way?

3.   Throughout the book, Susie sees into the mind of her killer, George Harvey, and watches memories in which it shows his troubled childhood that possibly led to his adult life as always being thought of as a little strange or “a character” as Susie’s father put it. Does being perhaps a bit mentally disabled excuse what Mr. Harvey did? If Susie’s case were ever reviewed by a court should Mr. Harvey be punished any less severely than any other murderer that was completely sane?

Key Passage: From page 320 (as Susie watches her family)

“These are the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life. (Suzanne Salmon)

Key Passage Explanation

Susie is finally letting go of her family back on earth and watches as her family does so also. They finally found a way to be happy with Susie gone. Susie is accepting her death as not only a burden anymore but now it is a blessing also because her family has grown into something “magnificent” even though there was a “great cost”. It was Susie’s life and death that were the “bones of a body” and when her family finally accepted what happened to Susie they came together as a “miraculous body [that] had been [her] life.”

Recommendation

I recommend The Lovely Bones not just to teenagers but to anyone else. It was a great book that kept you turning the pages. You were able to be inside everyone’s mind, not just Susie’s and got a picture of everyone growing; not just physically but more mentally so. Also, even though the book was set in the seventies it was as if the book could be set in any time. This book was exciting from beginning to end and kept you guessing. That was the element of the book that I liked the best: the guessing at what the outcome was going to be.