- The Good: Thrilling and personal account of one girl’s murder, as she retells it from heaven
- The Bad: Unsatisfying, inconsistent, saccharine
- The Literary: Expertly drawn characters
Susie Salmon opens her story with her murder. On December 6, 1973, Susie begins adjusting to her new life in her heaven, which is not at all what she expected. She watches life on earth, especially her grieving family and friends, and her killer.
You may think a novel about a fourteen-year-old child being raped and murdered would be difficult to read. And you’d be right. Susie story is traumatic and heart-wrenching, and she tells is openly and honestly. Her voice is mature. At least, she’s had years and years to experience her sadness, not just about her death, but about the people she left behind.
The story begins strong, as a mystery, for Susie knows her killer’s identity, but no one on Earth yet does. We watch as Susie watches. Susie’s father and younger sister have their suspicions, but the police have no evidence to implicate any of their suspects. Her killer masterfully plays the role of eccentric widower, evading questions easily.
Susie’s heaven is just one of many heavens. An in-between heaven. She doesn’t know anyone there but makes friends soon. She’s herself, with her fourteen-year-old body, and she attends a heavenly version of the same school, but all her classes are fun and she gets to play when she wants. Her primary pastime is watching Earth. And she knows that she cannot advance to another heaven until she can let go of watching. But that isn’t an option for her.
As the novel progresses, each character in Susie’s life explores a different type of grief. Susie’s delicate father who can’t let her memory go; her numb mother who seeks escape; an empathic grandmother; a sister who feels Susie’s presence; and two friends, very different from one another, who grow closer in Susie’s absence. Everyone is grieving, but they are isolated from the world and each other.
I also really appreciate the strong sense of time and place. In 1973, tragedy strikes in a Pennsylvania suburb. All the houses on the street have the same floor plan. A perfectly curated neighborhood with square lawns of grass. Two story square boxes, without much ornamentation, but inside, each family lives out their own little dramas.
The author makes some very strong choices about the direction of the novel, and while I appreciate these, I think the novel is the weaker because of them. It’s difficult to explain without spoilers, but I find the plot very unsatisfying, the “magic”—i.e. boundaries between heaven and Earth—inconsistent, and the sentiment overly saccharine, especially in the second half of the book.
Recommended for fans of contemporary fiction who enjoy bottle dramas and stories of broken families.