THE LOVELY BONES

Book Summary:
A fourteen-year-old girl watches her
family and friends from Heaven after she is
brutally raped and murdered.

Summary of Concerns:
This book contains mild profanity;
alternate sexualities; sexual activities
including sexual assault; sexual nudity;
violence; alcohol use; and suicide
commentary.

Young Adult

By Alice Sebold
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2773-7
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9 My father was the kind of dad who kept a nude photo of you when you were
three in the downstairs bathroom, the one that guests would use.
13 After this he said, "You're very pretty, Susie."
"Thanks," I said, even though he gave me what my friend Clarissa and I had
dubbed the skeevies.
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"No, Mr. Harvey," I said. I swallowed the rest of my Coke, which was a lot, and
said, "I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go."
He stood up and undid his hunchback number by the six dug-in steps that let to
the world. "I don't know why you think you're leaving."
I talked so that I would not have to takin in this knowledge: Mr. Harvey was no
character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was blocking the door.
"Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home."
"Take off your clothes."
"What?"
"Take your clothes off," Mr. Harvey said. "I want to check that you're still a virgin."
"I am, Mr. Harvey," I said.
"I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me."
"My parents?"
"They only want good girls," he said.
"Mr. Harvey," I said, "please let me leave."
"You aren't leaving, Susie. You're mine now."
…I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my
hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I was soon lying down
on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having
lost his glasses in the struggle.
…I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a
sweating man on top of me. To be trapped inside the earth and have no one know
where I was.
…Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet
and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted from the fight. I
had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian.
…He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the
yearbook.
…"Don't, Mr. Harvey," I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don't.
And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged "please"
before dying.
"I want you, Susie," he said.
"Please," I said. "Don't," I said. Sometimes I combined them. "Please don't" or
"Don't please." It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn't or yelling "I've
got it, I've got it, I've got it" as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands.
"Please don't."
But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket of my parka
and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth. The
only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.
As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his
hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the
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air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my
pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into
their side.
"Big white panties," he said.
I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt
the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in cat's cradle,
which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself
over me.
"Susie! Susie!" I heard my mother calling. "Dinner is ready."
He was inside me. He was grunting.
"We're having string beans and lamb."
I was the mortar, he was the pestle.
"Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake."
...Mr. Harvey made me lie still underneath him and listen to the beating of his
heart and the beating of mine. How mine skipped like a rabbit, and how his
thudded, a hammer against cloth. We lay there with our bodies touching, and, as I
shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had
lived.
16 I knew he was going to kill me. I did not realize then that I was an animal already
dying.
"Why don't you get up?" Mr. Harvey said as he rolled to the side and then
crouched over me.
His voice was gentle, encouraging, a lover's voice on a late morning. A suggestion,
not a command.
I could not move. I could not get up.
When I would not—was it only that, only that I would not follow his
suggestion?—he leaned to the side and felt, over his head, across the ledge where
his razor and shaving cream sat. He brought back a knife.
Unsheathed, it smiled at me, curving up in a grin.
He took the hat from my mouth.
"Tell me you love me," he said.
Gently, I did.
The end came anyway.
67 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.
69 Using a blue ballpoint pen, Brian Nelson had made an obscene hole where her
legs were crossed.
…how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women
that got misused by her peers,…
92 My father got what she called "finely drunkened."
104 No counselor could say he had flashed a light under the denser shrubbery by the
boy's dorm and found Salmon and Heckler going at it.
…She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport.
105 It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex
with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever.
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111 Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the boat, and he could not
stop it- his penis stiffened inside his jeans.
Lindsey reached her hand over.
"I'm sorry…" he began.
"I'm ready," my sister said.
At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the
walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were
windows.
116 What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried to stop himself.
He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child.
130 "How did your wife die?" my mother asked.
"Suicide."
134 She took his hand and placed it on her breast. She whispered in his ear. I knew
what was happening. Her rage, her loss, her despair. The whole life lost tumbling
out in an arc on that roof, clogging up her being. She needed Len to drive the
dead daughter out.
He pushed her back into the stucco surface of the wall as they kissed, and my
mother held on to him as if on the other side of his kiss there could be a new life.
138 Clarissa, giggly with both fear and lust, had unlocked her privates and slept with
Brian.
152 A young girl being led through the streets. She was taken to a pyre where she was
wound in a sheet and placed up on a platform built from sticks. The bright fire
that consumed her brought my mother into that deep, light, dreamlike bliss. This
girl was being burned alive, but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole.
159 She was waiting for her father outside a bar. He raped her in the bushes and then
strangled her. That time, as he grew conscious, coming up out of the stupor that
often clung on, he heard noises. He turned the dead girl's face toward his, and as
the voices grew closer he bit down on her ear. "Sorry, man," he heard two drunk
men say as they walked into the nearby bushes to take a leak.
175 …it was now full of nudes she'd copied out of Playboy, scaling various parts up or
down and adding hair and wrinkles where they had been airbrushed out- "but at
least I'm not a per for charcoal."
212 While the two of them sat with their backs to the fire, shivering at first and
drinking the brandy shots Grandma Lynn had Buckley serve them…
218 But Ray was different. Their kisses and early pushing and rubbings were objects
under glass to her- memories that she kept preserved.
253 He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she went away. Sex as an
act of willful forgetting. It was the kind he made more and more in the rooms
above the barbershop.
...The edges of Mr. Harvey seemed oddly blurred. For years he had kept at bay the
memories of the women he killed, but now, one by one, they were coming back.
The first girl he'd hurt was by accident. He got mad and couldn't stop himself, or
that was how he began to weave it into sense. She stopped going to the high
school that they were both enrolled in, but this didn't seem strange to him. By
that time he had moved so many times that he assumed that was what the girl
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had done. He had regretted it, this quiet, muffed rape of a school friend, but he
didn't see it as something that would stay with either one of them. It was as if
something outside him had resulted in the collision of their two bodies one
afternoon. For a second afterward, she'd stared. It was bottomless. Then she put
on her torn underpants, tucking them into her skirt's waistband to keep them in
place. They didn't speak, and she left. He cut himself with his penknife along the
back of his hand. When his father asked about the blood, there would be a
plausible explanation. "See," he could say, and point to the place on his hand. "It
was an accident."
267 Ray drew back the curtain. I turned to face him and opened my eyes. I felt a
marvelous draft on the inside of my thighs.
"It's okay," I said.
He stepped slowly into the tub. At first he did not touch me, but then, tentatively,
he traced a small scar along my side. We watched together as his finger moved
down the ribbony wound.
"Ruth's volleyball incident, nineteen seventy-five," I said. I shivered again.
"You're not Ruth," he said, his face full of wonder.
I took the hand that had reached the end of the cut and placed it under my left
breast.
"I've watched you both for years," I said. "I want you to make love to me."
His lips parted to speak, but what was on his lips now was too strange to say out
loud. He brushed my nipple with his thumb, and I pulled his head toward me. We
kissed. The water came down between our bodies and wet the sparse hair along
his chest and stomach. I kissed him because I wanted to see Ruth and I wanted to
see Holly and I wanted to know if they could see me. In the shower I could cry and
Ray could kiss my tears, never knowing exactly why I shed them.
I touched every part of him and held it in my hands. I cupped his elbow in my
palm. I dragged his pubic hair out straight between my fingers. I held that part of
him that Mr. Harvey had forced inside me. Inside my head I said the word gentle,
and then I said the word man.
268 We made love then. We made love in the shower and in the bedroom and under
the lights and fake glow-in-the-dark stars. While he rested, I kissed him across the
line of his backbone and blessed each knot of muscle, each mole and blemish.
280 I imagined her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mute juleps with Tennessee
Williams and Dean Martin.

Profanity Count
Bitch 1
Fuck 1
Shit 5