Book club reading repsonse: "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold

In the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, there is a very major theme of loss, as nearly every single important character in the book loses something valuable to them, physical or otherwise. But the book isn't just about losing things, it is more about how loss can change us, and the affects it can have on our lives.

The most obvious loss is Susie Salmon's. She not only loses her body when Mr. Harvey kills her, but her friends, her family, and her life on Earth as well. This changes Susie by sending her to her heaven, but also by forcing her to move on. At first all Susie does is miss her family, until she realizes that she can watch them from heaven. As the book goes on and Susie watches her family and friends move on, she does, too. Near the very end of the book, Susie reflects back on what has happened over the past few years: "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....The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life." This quote explains exactly how Susie eventually deals with the loss of her body, and life. She accepts that although she is dead, the people she loves have moved on and that she has, too. She sees the things that happened after her death not with resentment or jealousy that those are things she is no longer a part of, but she sees them as more of a trade; she died, and in return these great things on Earth continue to happen.

Susie's family deals with losing Susie each in their own ways. The mother Abigail Salmon first struggles, and has to leave her family for a while until her husband has a heat attack. This makes her accept that Susie is gone and the family needs her. Jack Salmon at first focuses on trying to catch Mr. Harvey and accuses him of killing Susie. After Abigail leaves, losing her jolts him back to reality and he moves on, too. He starts caring for Lindsey and Buckley, his children. Even Mr. Harvey has to deal with loss. When his mother dies, it gives him certain ideas about how to live his life, but it also leaves him mourning for the rest of his life. Mr. Harvey was unable to move on in the same way that Susie and the rest of the Salmon's did.

All of this shows how Alice Sebold conveyed her theme of loss, and getting past it, in her book The Lovely Bones. Susie, the Salmon's, and their friends are able to get through everything and eventually to move on, and they are portrayed as the "good" characters. Mr. Harvey, on the other hand, doesn't move on as they do, and he is also the villain of the book. That just adds to Sebold making moving on seem more as a good thing, as something that should be done. She also effectively describes how hard getting past a major loss, such as the death of a family member or close friend, can be.