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Description edit
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Summary edit
Susie Salmon is a fourteen year old girl that was murdered. One afternoon she was walking home and the unthinkible happened she was murdered by her neighbor. Then she is up in heaven and is watching over her family and her murderer. Also she is helping her familly find who her mudered is. Soon... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
Characters edit
- Susie Salmon: She was a fourteen-year-old girl that was murdered on December 6, 1973. She is the one who is telling the story.
- Jack Salmon: He is Susies loving father. Who love makeing ships in a bottle. Also is determined to find her murderer.
- Abigail Salmon: She is Susie's mother, who needed to find her own way to deal with Susie's death.
- Lindsey Salmon: She is Susie's younger sister. She was thirteen and she is very intelligent. She is also gifted.
- Hal Heckler: He is the brother of Lindsey's boyfriend. He likes to ride motorcycles..
- Buckley Salmon: Susie's little brother. He was four years old and too young to understand the implications of Susie's disappearance.
- Ray Singh: He is an Indian. He was born in India though he lived in England and he just moved in the US. He has a crush on Susie. He was Susie's first and last kiss.
- Ruana Singh: Ray's mother, also Indian. Smokes Suzie's mom's favorite cigarettes.
- Ruth Connors: She is a girl from Susie's school that felt her spirit. She is the type of kid that others do not pay attention to in school. She is good in drawing and writing poetry.
- Len Fenerman: The detective investigating the murder of Susie.
- Grandma Lynn: She is Abigail's mother and Susie's grandmother who tries to put the family back together.She is very outgoing.
- George Harvey: He is the Salmons' neighbor. He has a very beautiful garden. He builds dollhouses for specialty stores. He was responsible for the missing children, including Susie..
- Samuel Heckler: He is Lindsey's boyfriend who plays the saxophone. Her 'one,' as described by Susie.
- Clarissa: She is Susie's liberated friend.
- Mrs. Dewitt: She is Susie's favorite teacher and the English/Literature teacher.
- Brian Nelson: He is a friend of Susie's. Susie dubbed him "the scarecrow." He is Clarissa's boyfriend.
- Holiday: The Salmons' dog.
- Franny: Susie's intake counselor in Heaven.
- Holly: Susie's roommate in Heaven.
- Mrs. Stead: She is one of the Salmons' neighbors.
- Nate: He is Buckley's friend.
- Mr. Caden: He is the principal of Susie's school..
- Mrs. Connors: She is Ruth's mother.
- Grace Tarking: She lived down the street and went to a private school. She is the first person Susie had taken a photo from her very first camera.
- Mrs. Flanagan: She lives on the property where the sinkhole was. Her family made their living by charging people to dump their appliances in the sinkhole.
- Miss Ryan: She had come to Kennet from a Catholic school and taken over the art department from two ex-hippies who had been fired.
- Mr. Peterford: He is the discipline officer at Kennet.
- Mr. Utemeyer: The late Mrs. Utemeyer's son.
- Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer: She is the woman who called Lindsey, Natalie.
- Natalie Utemeyer: She is the daughter of Mrs. Utemeyer who died at an early age.
- The Gilberts: The owners of the Labrador who found Susie's elbow.
- The O'Dwyers: One of the Salmons' neighbors.
- Grandfather: He is Susie's granddad that she saw in Heaven..
- Akhil Singh: He is a professor. He is the father of Ray and husband of Ruana.
- Nurse Eliot: She was the nurse who greatly supported and helped the Salmons.
- Abigail Suzanne Heckler: An Important Character at the end.
Quotes edit
-
“I don't mean la-la angel crap, but I do think there's a heaven.”
Ruth Connors -
“I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.”
Susie Salmon -
“Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.”
Jack Salmon -
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
Juan Ramon Jimenez via Susie Salmon -
“Your first kiss is destiny knocking.”
Grandma Lynn -
“Journal writing: At the tips of feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light...still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.”
Ruth Connors -
“I'd say it would be pretty hard to play soccer on the soccer field when it's approximately twenty feet from where my sister was supposedly murdered.”
Lindsey Salmon -
“You remind me of my wife," "She can't draw either?”
Len Fenerman & Abigail Salmon -
“Just you and your mother," my grandmother said. "The most frightening pairing imaginable.”
Grandma Lynn -
“We could keep trying," Ruth said. "I'm game if you don't tell anyone." "I thought you liked girls," Ray said. "I'll make you a deal," Ruth said. "You can pretend I'm Susie and I will too." "You are so entirely screwed up.R”
Ruth Connors & Ray Singh -
“Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you've seen it in print.”
Susie Salmon (In Ruth's body) -
“Do you ever think about the dead, Ray?" "I'm in med school.”
Susie Salmon (In Ruth's body) -
“"His eyes were the darkest grey. When I watched him from heaven I did not hesitate to fall inside of them."”
Susie Salmon -
“In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on.”
Susie Salmon -
“He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.”
Susie Salmon -
“When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things.”
-
“Her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.”
-
“Watch out what faces you make. You'll freeze that way.”
Grandma Lynn -
“Life is a beautiful gasoline rainbow.”
Susie Salmon -
“There was too much blood in the earth.”
Susie Salmon -
“All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.”
Susie Salmon -
“...marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever expect for a picture.”
Susie Salmon -
“that person had a sad end.........at least she's still in heaven”
pie -
“Nothing is ever certain.”
Len Fenerman -
“Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corner 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.”
Susie Salmon -
“I wanted to lift him up, like statues I'd seen in art history books. A woman lifting up a man. The rescue in reverse. Daughter to father saying, "It's okay. You're okay. Now won't let anything hurt."”
Susie Salmon -
“The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away, but when people left they always came back.”
Susie Salmon (Referring to Buckley) -
“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time. If they want to be found, that is.”
Len Fenerman -
“To us there was only one true love in everyone's life; we had no concept of compromise, or retries.”
Susie Salmon -
“Lindsey: I'm scared. | Samuel: Don't be. ♥”
-
“What the box held was typical or disappointing or miraculous depending on the eye. It was typical because he was a thirteen-year-old boy, or it was disappointing because it was not a wedding ring, or it was miraculous. He'd given her half a heart. It was gold and from inside his Hukapoo shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord. ♥”
Susie Salmon (Reffering to Lindsey and Samuel) -
“Reproductive organ = "Baby making machinery"”
Abigail Salmon via Susie Salmon -
“Jack: I'm glad Susie had a nice boy like her. I'll thank your son for that. | Ruana: ... <smiled> | Jack: He wrote her a love note. | Ruana: Yes. | Jack: I wish I had known enough to do the same. Tell her I loved her on that last day.”
-
“Ruana: A father's suspicion... | Jack: Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.”
-
“It's <Zipper of a dress> one of the reasons for a man--you can't do this stuff yourself.”
Grandma Lynn -
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
Jack Salmon -
“Ruth: Did you feel something when you kissed Susie? | Ray: Yes. | Ruth: What? | Ray: That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. ♥”
-
“But at some point I had decided to take portraits of my mother. When he'd pick the roll up at the photo lab my father sat into the car staring at photos of woman he felt he barely knew anymore. Since then he had taken these photos out too many times, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses allowed him to name it. he had been falling in love all over again. ♥”
Susie Salmon -
“Samuel: I love you. | Lindsey: I know. | Samuel: No, I mean, I love you, and I want to marry you, and I want to live in this house! | Lindsey: What? | Samuel: That hideous, college shit is over! | Lindsey: Not for me, it isn't. | Samuel: Marry me. | Lindsey: Samuel. | Samuel: I'm tired of doing the right things. Marry me and I'll make this house gorgeous. | Lindsey: Who will support us? | Samuel: We will, somehow. | Lindsey: Okay. | Samuel: Okay? | Lindsey: I think I can. I mean, yes! ♥”
-
“Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.”
Grandfather -
“I thought if I was very quiet I would hear you. If I was still enough you might come back.”
Jack Salmon -
“I fell in love with you again while you were away. ♥”
Jack Salmon -
“I realized how much I wish I could be where my mother was. His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything--for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes. ♥”
Susie Salmon (Referring to Jack and Abigail Salmon) -
“He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she went away. Sex as an act of willful forgetting.”
Susie Salmon (Referring to Len Fenerman) -
“He was watching her lips move and not really listening to her. Wanting to kiss her instead. ♥”
Susie Salmon (Referring to Jack and Abigail Salmon) -
“Ray: Ruth? | Ruth <Susie>: Yes? | Ray: Can I kiss you again? | Ruth <Susie>: Yes. | Ray: What is it? | Ruth <Susie>: When you kiss me I see heaven. ♥”
-
“How could it be that you could love someone somuch and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home? Shehad put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind herand ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make himdisappear? erase their life and children?”
Abigail
-
These were 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.
Highlighted by 334 Kindle customers -
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Highlighted by 325 Kindle customers -
When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living—to learn to accept?
Highlighted by 222 Kindle customers -
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
Highlighted by 205 Kindle customers -
Juan Ramón Jiménez. It went like this: “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
Highlighted by 178 Kindle customers -
“When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.” “What about the dead?” I asked. “Where do we go?” She wouldn’t answer me.
Highlighted by 157 Kindle customers -
obsequious innocence peppered with wonder about their procedures or useless ideas that he presented as if they might help.
Highlighted by 55 Kindle customers -
assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day.
Highlighted by 55 Kindle customers -
Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women. Samuel Heckler was holding Lindsey’s hand. A word from her readings popped into her head: subjugation.
Highlighted by 40 Kindle customers -
ardentness was off-putting on a sunny afternoon, and when the open faces of young men caught sight of her they closed down or looked away. She zigzagged up and across the park. There were obvious places where she could go, like the rambles, to document the history of violence there without even leaving the trees, but she preferred those places people considered safe.
Highlighted by 29 Kindle customers
Setting & Locations edit
The time setting varies. It starts off in December, 1973, but travels backwards and forwards as Susie looks down upon Earth.
- Pennsylvania
- Fairfax
- Motorrad
- New York
- Connecticut
- Farben
- New Hampshire
- The In Between: Alice Sebold's version of Heaven, in which Susie lives after her death. Its scenery varies from person to person, and in Susie's In Between, she attends her ideal high school, the one she dreamed of attending before she died.
- Norristown, Pennsylvania: It is the place where the story took place. The place where Susie grew up, and the primary place she watches over her friends and family.
- Stolfuz Cornfield: This is where Susie was raped and killed. It is located at the back of Kennet Junior High.
- Kennet Junior High: This is where Susie studied.
- Krusoe Winery: This is where Abigail worked when she went to California.
First Sentence edit
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.
Table of Contents edit
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Snapshots
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Bones
Acknowledgments
Glossary edit
- Walking Dead Syndrome: It is when other people see the dead person and don't see you.
- Aperitif: a drink taken before a meal as an appetizer
- Benzedrine: a preparation of the sulfate of amphetamine (C9H13N)2·H2SO4 formerly used in medicine
- Incontrovertible: not open to question; indisputable
- Campanile: a usually freestanding belltower
- Proleptic: In anticipation
- Bathos/Bathetic: merriam webster: a : the sudden appearance of the commonplace in otherwise elevated matter or styleb : anticlimax2: exceptional commonplaceness : triteness3: insincere or overdone pathos : sentimentalism
- Anodyne: merriam webster:1: serving to alleviate pain2: not likely to offend or arouse tensions : innocuous
Themes & Symbolism edit
- Love: An undescribable feeling that everyone has experienced. The book also explores teen love and how she was not able to experience love while she was alive.
- Dealing with Grief and Loss: What happens in the aftermath of a tragic event
- Death and the Afterlife: The author takes a refreshing look at what the afterlife may be like.
Series & Lists edit
This is book 64 of 95 in Telegraph Top 100 Books, 2008. (authoritative list)
Preceded by The Secret History, and followed by The Count of Monte Cristo.
This is book 72 of 100 in Top 100 Books That Defined The Noughties (Telegraph). (authoritative list)
Preceded by District and Circle: Poems, and followed by The Islamist.
This is book 20 of 195 in Shelfari Most Popular (June 2010). (authoritative list)
Preceded by Pride and Prejudice, and followed by Memoirs of a Geisha.
This book is in KCPL Discussion Kit (Aug2010). (community list)
This is book 74 of 98 in ALA's Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009. (authoritative list)
Preceded by What's Happening to My Body?: Book for Girls a Growing Up Guide for Parents and Daughters, and followed by Anastasia Krupnik.
This book is in Significant Speculative Fiction (Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror). (community list)
This is book 19 of 195 in Shelfari Most Popular (June 2011). (authoritative list)
Preceded by Pride and Prejudice, and followed by The Hunger Games.
This is book 4 of 10 in Publishers Weekly Bestselling Novels In 2002. (authoritative list)
Preceded by The Remnant, and followed by Prey.
This is book 9 of 10 in Publishers Weekly Bestselling Novels of 2003. (authoritative list)
Preceded by Blow Fly, and followed by The Wedding.
This is book 10 of 94 in Whitcoulls Top 100 (2011). (authoritative list)
Followed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
This is book 20 of 195 in Shelfari Most Popular (December 2011). (authoritative list)
Preceded by Pride and Prejudice, and followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns.
This is book 18 of 194 in Shelfari Most Popular (December 2010). (authoritative list)
Preceded by The Catcher in the Rye, and followed by Pride and Prejudice.
Authors & Contributors edit
- Alice Sebold (Author)
Other Contributors:
- Tiia-Mai Nõmmik (Translator)
- Külli Suurevälja (Editor)
- Tiiu Kraut (Editor)
- Lisbet Holst (Translator)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Little Brown and company
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2002
ISBN: 0316666343
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Little Brown and company
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2002
ISBN: 0316666343
Page Count: 328
Awards edit
- Bram Stoker Award (2002: First Novel)
- Book Sense Book of the Year (2003: Adult Fiction)
- Bram Stoker Award (Finalist, 2002: Novel)
- California Book Award (2002: First Fiction, Silver)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: PS3619.E26 L68
- Dewey: 813.6
Subjects edit
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Movie Connections edit
- The Lovely Bones (IMDb): 2009 release produced by DreamWorks and Directed by Peter Jackson. Starring Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg.
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