The Lovely Bones Study Guide
Plot summary
The novel begins with an anecdote, used as an epigraph, in which Susie recalls her father amusing her as a child by shaking a snow globe with a small penguin inside all by himself. When she worries about the penguin, he says, "Don't worry, Susie. He's got a nice life. He's trapped inside a perfect world."
In the opening sentences, Susie introduces herself to us and takes us to the date of her death, December 6, 1973, "before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons and in the daily mail ... when people believed things like that didn't happen."
At dusk, with a light snow falling, she takes a shortcut back home across a small cornfield from her junior high school to her home in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. When she stops to taste a snowflake, she is accosted by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-30s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. Once she enters, he rapes and strangles her, cutting her body into parts to make it easier to carry, and then collapses the den. An elbow, the only part of Susie ever to be found, falls out of his bag as he returns home.
Susie tells us later that she missed all this as her spirit was fleeing toward heaven. On the way there, she reaches out and brushes Ruth Connors, a classmate who is walking near the school while Susie is being killed. Ruth dreams about the incident that night, and will become increasingly fascinated with not just Susie, but murdered women as a whole, over the next few years. Over this time, she also becomes close friends with Ray Singh, a British immigrant of Indian descent who had given Susie her first kiss a few days before her death.
She arrives in heaven to at first find it boring and taking the form of a high school with "orange and turquoise blocks" that she never got to go to, saying "life here is a perpetual yesterday." She and a fellow teen girl,
The novel begins with an anecdote, used as an epigraph, in which Susie recalls her father amusing her as a child by shaking a snow globe with a small penguin inside all by himself. When she worries about the penguin, he says, "Don't worry, Susie. He's got a nice life. He's trapped inside a perfect world."
In the opening sentences, Susie introduces herself to us and takes us to the date of her death, December 6, 1973, "before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons and in the daily mail ... when people believed things like that didn't happen."
At dusk, with a light snow falling, she takes a shortcut back home across a small cornfield from her junior high school to her home in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. When she stops to taste a snowflake, she is accosted by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-30s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. Once she enters, he rapes and strangles her, cutting her body into parts to make it easier to carry, and then collapses the den. An elbow, the only part of Susie ever to be found, falls out of his bag as he returns home.
Susie tells us later that she missed all this as her spirit was fleeing toward heaven. On the way there, she reaches out and brushes Ruth Connors, a classmate who is walking near the school while Susie is being killed. Ruth dreams about the incident that night, and will become increasingly fascinated with not just Susie, but murdered women as a whole, over the next few years. Over this time, she also becomes close friends with Ray Singh, a British immigrant of Indian descent who had given Susie her first kiss a few days before her death.
She arrives in heaven to at first find it boring and taking the form of a high school with "orange and turquoise blocks" that she never got to go to, saying "life here is a perpetual yesterday." She and a fellow teen girl,