The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Chapter 3-6
Written by Katlyn

Summary

Susie talked about a girl that she barely knew from school, Ruth. Susie accidentally touched her on the way up to Heaven and Ruth felt her presence in a dream. Ruth’s parents did not believe her when she told them that she dreamt of a ghost so she kept it to herself. When Susie was discovered missing, Ruth became obsessed with Susie and collected pictures and information on Susie and began writing dark poetry and smoking weed to somehow dull her feelings.

Susie was missing her mother dearly as she recalled her eleventh birthday in which she snuck downstairs to find her unwrapped birthday gift, a camera. She went to the back porch and saw her mother staring out and Susie realized that her mother was full of secret emotion that she would never understand. She took a photo of her mother which snapped her out of her trance. Lindsey later found this photo in Susie’s room after she disappeared and discovered that their mother was mysterious and unknown to them.

Quotes

“Ocean Eyes,” my father called her when he wanted one of her chocolate-covered cherries, which she kept hidden in the liquor cabinet as her private treat. And now I understood the name. I had thought it was because they were blue, but now I saw it was because they were bottomless in a way that I found frightening.

“You are so special to me, little man,” my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father’s creased face, the fine brightspots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father’s cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.

Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.

Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.

My father nodded. “You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not fully understand.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.

If I had known this was to be the sex scene of my life, I might have prepared a bit, reapplied my Strawberry-Banana Kissing Potion as I came in the door.

She believed stuffed animals moved at night when humans went to sleep. She still thought in her father’s lunchbox there might be minute cows and sheep that found time to graze on the bourbon and baloney.

Questions for consideration

What was your favorite quote(s) from these chapters?

Do you think Susie will be able to communicate with others as she did with her father?

What do you think happened to Fenerman’s wife?

Do you think Harvey suspects that the police are after him?

What do you think of the relationship between Ruth and Ray?

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