This book had been sitting on my TBR pile for years and I finally got to it this year. Not only do I get the satisfaction of finally finishing it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that that I quite enjoyed it.
Our first person narrator Susie Salmon is a 14 year old girl living with her family in small town Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. When the story starts, Susie is telling her story from beyond the grave (her ‘heaven’), sharing the story of her murder and how her family recovers and moves forward.
My reluctance to start this book was that I feared it would be either hard to read (I knew it was about the rape and murder of a teenage girl) or designed to be a tear jerker, a la Jodi Picoult. I am pleased to report that it was neither! Susie’s murder happens right away (not a spoiler), and then the tension to pull the plot along comes with the rest of her family reacting to her disappearance/death, and ongoing cold case that her murder becomes. Sebold treats her characters with kindness and what felt almost like a slight detachment. We watched them all propel themselves forward from tragedy in different ways- her younger sister Lindsey adopts a hard outer shell, her mother pinwheels into an affair, her father focuses on proving that the creepy next door neighbour was the murderer (not a spoiler: he is).
The kindness and the detachment seem connected. Although a murdered child is a terrible, awful, unimaginable thing, because our narrator is Susie, we don’t get the full brunt of her family’s emotions because she is cut off from them. Rather, we see the actions they take to move forward in time and space as they heal from this event. (It was this potential for emotional wreckage that really had had me avoiding this book- it filled me with dread that we might have to live inside the first person emotion of that loss). Viewed from this distance, the kindness comes in as a lack of judgment for how each family member reacts- the responses happen and they aren’t right or wrong, they just are.
Susie’s grandmother moves back in to support the family through the tragedy, and she is a delight- a chainsmoking, opinionated force of a grandmother that was not always a nurturing type, but really steps up when things get tough and also provides some lightness and humour that the family has lost.
The weakest parts of this for me were the parts set in Susie’s heaven and those parts where she connects with and through Ruth, her friend who can still sense her presence. On heaven: there is some background provided about how she’s in this temporary limbo where she has all her favorite trappings from life on earth, but can’t yet cross over into the permanent part of heaven where her already-departed love ones reside. She will be stuck in this limbo as long as she keeps trying to communicate with her friends and family on earth (which she does for the length of the novel, no surprise). Compared with the rest of the novel this part felt a little hokey. The Ruth stuff was weirder and didn’t feel in tone with the rest of the book. Susie is arguably the least interesting part of this book, and having her ‘reach out and touch’ people got in the way of what ‘plot’ there was in this character study.