A Reading Group Guide “Heaven is a place where artful little books are as big as this.” —Janet Maslin, CBS Sunday Morning Susie Salmon is 14. She likes peppermint-stick ice cream, art class, and a boy named Ray Singh who kissed her in front of her locker one afternoon when she was still alive. Now she is in heaven. It’s a place where all her simplest desires are fulfilled, but not her dearest wish of all: to be back home with her family. PHOTO: JERRY BAUER So Susie must watch as those left behind on earth struggle to cope with her disappearance: Her school friends trade worried rumors, “SEBOLD’S her killer tries to cover his tracks, and her family is by turns torn writing achieves an apart and drawn closer together by their grief and love. Gradually, exquisite balance between Susie explores her new otherworldly home, tests the boundaries sadness and hopefulness. between the living and the dead, and begins to understand that even The nerve-ending pain of in the wake of tragedy there will be laughter and joy for the people great loss and the promise she cares about. of life’s inevitable With tenderness, humor, and the astonishing voice of an unforgettable march forward.” heroine, THE LOVELY BONES builds out of a family’s unthinkable loss a story full of promise and hope. —Maria Russo, WashingtonWashington PostPost BookBook WorldWorld 1 What readers and critics say about Alice Sebold’s THE LOVELY BONES “Savagely beautiful....A strange and compelling novel.” “A stunning achievement.” —THE NEW YORKER —MONICA WOOD, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “THE LOVELY BONES is a book that truly defies a pat Sebold deals with almost unthink- “Mesmerizing.... description. The subject is not death, or life, but how close able subjects with humor and intelligence and a kind of mysterious grace....THE LOVELY BONES takes the stuff of the two really are....Be warned: This is a book neighborhood tragedy—the unexplained disappearance of a you will have a hard time forgetting.” child, the shattered family alone with its grief—and turns it –SARAH DESSEN, RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER into literature.” —KATHERINE BOUTON, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Don’t start THE LOVELY BONES unless you can finish it. The book begins with more horror than you could imagine, “A novel that is painfully fine and but closes with more beauty than you could hope accomplished, one which readers will have their own for....Alice Sebold has done something difficulties relinquishing, long after the last page is turned.” miraculous here.” —PAULA L. WOODS, LOS ANGELES TIMES —RON CHARLES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR “So this is what heaven is like. It comes bottled “The most touching and yet bracing imagining in a blue drink of a book and reads like a fairy tale....Sebold of what the dead may have to say to the living that I’ve read has worked wonders.” in a long time.” —MARTA SALIJ, DETROIT FREE PRESS —KAREN VALBY, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY “Here is a writer who honors fiction’s primary gift—the “An audacious novel....THE LOVELY BONES seems infinity of possibilities—by following her imagination to to be saying there are more important things in life on earth wondrous and terrifying places.” than retribution. Like forgiveness, like love.” —KAREN SANDSTROM, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER —CONAN PUTNAM, CHICAGO TRIBUNE “A haunting meditation on family and youth, loss, “THE LOVELY BONES is a story you’ll want to pretend was love, and redemption. It is a book that startles and rewards written for yourself alone.” on page after page, a book that rivets attention from its —U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT simple opening lines…Susie’s voice is the key ingredient in the brilliant magic of THE LOVELY BONES. She is the voice “A keenly observed portrait of familial love and of promise unfulfilled, life cut short, forever young, but also how it endures and changes over time....A deeply affecting achingly real.” meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can –JOHN MARSHALL, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER be redeemed—slowly, grudgingly, and in fragments— through love and acceptance.” “A luminescent debut novel.” —MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES —JOY PRESS, VILLAGE VOICE “There aren’t many writers who could pull off a story “A triumphant novel....The breakout fiction debut about a dead girl, narrated by that dead girl—from heaven, of the year....It’s a knockout.” —LEV GROSSMAN, TIME no less. But this astonishingly assured novel has wit, affection, and just the right amount of heart.” —SARA NELSON, GLAMOUR 2 3 The Oddity of Suburbia Questions for Discussion by Alice Sebold My family was watching television when a couple—the mother 1. In Susie’s Heaven, she is surrounded by things that bring her peace. and father to a woman who lived one street over with her family—were hit What would your Heaven be like? Is it surprising that in Susie’s inward, by a car and landed on our front lawn. The man who hit them leapt out of his personal version of the hereafter there is no God or larger being that car and shouted to two boys playing basketball in the driveway of the house presides? across from ours. He yelled: “These people need an ambulance.”He then 2. Why does Ruth become Susie’s main connection to Earth? Was it proceeded to jump back in his car and drive three houses down, where he accidental that Susie touched Ruth on her way up to Heaven, or was Ruth calmly parked in his own driveway and went inside his house. The daughter actually chosen to be Susie’s emotional conduit? of the couple who had been hit had been walking behind her parents and, 3. Rape is one of the most alienating experiences imaginable. Susie’s rape having lapped them once, now came up upon the scene. We heard the ends in murder and changes her family and friends forever. Alienation is screaming and ran out. Both of her parents were killed. One died on our transferred, in a sense, to Susie’s parents and siblings. How do they each lawn, the other died later, in a hospital. And the man who struck them? He experience loneliness and solitude after Susie’s death? was both one of our neighbors and, by profession, a paramedic. 4. Why does the author include details about Mr. Harvey’s childhood and As I grew upand left home, living in Manhattan and just outside L.A., I his memories of his mother? By giving him a human side, does Sebold get began to realize more and more that within the suburban world of my us closer to understanding his motivation? Sebold explained in an inter- upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more view about the novel that murderers “are not animals but men,”and that romanticized parts of the world. Ultimately, the East Village had nothing on is what makes them so frightening. Do you agree? Nowhere U.S.A. and I returned, after several failed attempts at “the urban novel,”to the material I knew best. Of course, I found the elements for THE 5. Discuss the way in which guilt manifests itself in the various characters— LOVELY BONES in a combination of things, but a major element in its pages Jack, Abigail, Lindsay, Mr. Harvey, Len Fenerman. is the oddness of what we often condescendingly refer to as the suburbs. 6. “Pushing on the inbetween” is how Susie describes her efforts to connect In those places—like the place where I grew up—where all the houses of a with those she has left behind on Earth. Have you ever felt as though particular development share the same floor plan or, in upper end versions someone was trying to communicate with you from “the inbetween?” of recent years, vary among three or four, live people with lives much more 7. Does Buckley really see Susie, or does he make up a version of his sister as complex than the architecture containing them would suggest. But it took a way of understanding and not being too emotionally damaged by her me years to go home again in my mind and imagination. To see the incidents death? How do you explain tragedy to a child? Do you think Susie’s par- that occurred all around me as a child and as a teenager as worthy of narra- ents do a good job of helping Buckley comprehend the loss of his sister? tive. But growing up in one of many supposed Nowhere U.S.A.’s has created 8. for me a bottomless well of narrative ideas. Susie is killed just as she was beginning to see her mother and father as real people, not just as parents. Watching her parents’ relationship Who would have thought that the place I most despised growing up—where change in the wake of her death, she begins to understand how they react I felt like the weirdest freak and the biggest loser—would turn out to be a to the world and to each other. How does this newfound understanding gift to me. But what I have finally, to my joy, been made aware of is that affect Susie? while I grew up hearing that there were ‘a thousand stories in the naked city and none of them the same,’ this was as true of the look-alike houses all 9. Can Abigail’s choice to leave her family be justified? around me as it was of the places I lived as an adult.