“Following the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades of middle school, high school would have been a fresh start. When I got to Fairfax High I would insist on being called Suzanne. I would wear my hair feathered or up in a bun. I would have a body that the boys wanted and the girls envied, but I’d be so nice on top of it all that they would feel too guilty to do anything but worship me.” 

This quote shows why Susie’s personal small-heaven is an idealized version of High School. She dreams of being able to transform herself into a new, perfect version of herself once she leaves middle school and attends high school. This represents the novel’s coming-of-age themes, as Susie longs to achieve milestones, such as high school, university, and marriage, that her death denies her. Throughout the novel, Susie must accept that she will never experience these things herself before she can move on to true Heaven. 

“I hadn’t yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it.”

At first, the only family member that Susie misses while in heaven is the family dog Holiday. She has not yet accepted her death and tries to deny her reality by not missing her family. This sets up the main emotional arc of the novel—both Susie’s family on earth, as well as Susie herself, need to accept and grieve Susie’s death before they can move on with their lives.

“There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to the loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardener. Sunny neighbor. My mother’s eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss.”

Throughout the novel, Abigail struggles with reconciling the different facets of her identity. She feels that her marriage and the birth of her three children have crushed her dreams of moving to Paris or becoming a teacher. This picture is the first time Susie sees Abigail as a complete person, rather than just her mother.