My favorite character in The Lovely Bones was Ruth Connors for no other reason than that she reflected my own personality, but to an extreme. Like Ruth, I don’t morn for the dead like most people do. “I realize how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers.” (77)
“Like a phone call from the jail cell, I brushed by Ruth Connors - wrong number, accidental call.” (37)
“If her mother or her more approachable teachers did not want to hear the darker reality she had experienced, she would cloak this reality in poetry.” (38)
“She sat in the tool shed with a flashlight, looking at photos of me and smoking more grass than even the potheads at school could suck down.” (40)
“Sometimes I think she’s lucky, you know. I hate this place.” -Ruth Connors (82)
“’This is not Susie, for Chrissakes!’ her mother would say, plunking down an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter.” (114)
“…she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow.” (117)
“Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. ‘I think she listens.’” (124)
