53 pages • 1 hour read
Colleen HooverHeart Bones
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Experiencing Love
In the moments after finding her mother’s lifeless body, Beyah reflects that the best thing Janean ever did for her was die. This observation is an insight into the reality that this unloved, late-adolescent protagonist has never had a trusting relationship or experienced real intimacy of any sort. As the narrative progresses, readers watch Beyah relate to her father, her stepmother, and her stepsister with emotional distance and distrust. When Samson tries to reach out to help her, recognizing that she is hungry and broke, she reacts almost violently, assuming that he, like other men, wants sexual favors from her. Throughout the first portion of the narrative, the only person to whom she extends any trust is her friend Natalie, and she readily admits that even she and Natalie could not be called best friends.
The second portion of the narrative follows the efforts of several people to break through the hard shell of isolation and distrust surrounding Beyah. Though no one is immediately successful in gaining her trust, Beyah begins to understand that Sara is a person of integrity who, more than anything, just wants a sister. While she believes her father has essentially failed her, she also understands that he means well and is quite interested in and even protective of her. The person who has the greatest impact on her is Samson, who appeals to her physically and emotionally while continually challenging her unwillingness to trust, slowly compelling her to open her inner self to him. Even though he withholds his life story, Samson eventually draws out all of the dark secrets Beyah keeps from everyone else. As the story progresses, Beyah becomes able to be not only physically but also emotionally intimate with Samson.
The thematic center of the story is Beyah changing from a person who cannot trust and is closed off to love to someone who is so loving that she can forgive and support Samson through his difficulties. Having experienced the potential depths of intimacy with someone who seems to know her better than anyone, Beyah refuses to let go of that closeness. In supporting him, she asks those whom she did not trust to now trust her and to accept her perception that Samson is a worthy person. While the relationship between the two takes place initially over a few weeks in the summer, it is ultimately fulfilled four years later, when Samson emerges from prison to find Beyah waiting. The implication from the author is that intimacy and trust, characterized by accepting love, are those qualities that can endure when every other human relationship falters.
Financial Prejudice
Beyah grew up in a home where she was unable to purchase necessities regularly, much less enjoy any luxuries. Yet, while she does not know what it is like to have money, she does know that people who have even moderate funds look down upon her. Beyah explains that, from the time she was in middle school, other children understood she lived in abject poverty, and this made Beyah feel excluded and isolated. Even Dakota, who pays her for sex whenever he can, looks down on her and refuses to acknowledge her in any way. Beyah thus guards her actions carefully. Though she has not eaten for a full day, when she finds bread intended for seagulls and starts to eat it, she immediately stops after she realizes someone is watching her; she assumes she will be judged because she is so poor that she must eat scraps intended for animals.
When Beyah comes to live with her father, Hoover reveals the subtle but real financial prejudice of her new middle-class stepfamily. For instance, Sara turns up her nose at the idea of shopping for clothes at Walmart and is astonished that Beyah jumps at the opportunity. The more Sara talks to Beyah about her activities and her lifestyle, the more the disparity between the two is apparent. Sitting around the fire at the beach with other young people, Beyah realizes that she is completely unlike them because they are all the children of people who can afford the luxury of traveling to the beach for summer vacations.
Beyah makes it clear that, even as she grows in her ability to accept her new family, she never feels she fits with them financially. Over time, she discovers that one of the things bonding her most to Samson is that both come from abject poverty, a reality she senses she will never fully overcome. At the conclusion of the narrative, Beyah works toward becoming an attorney—not because she wants to become one of the upper-middle-class people she has been associating with but rather because she wants to provide legal help for people from backgrounds like her own.
Privilege, Deprivation, and Structural Inequalities
The novel takes on the theme of the social inequalities faced by the poor. Hoover draws a stark contrast between Beyah’s original setting—poverty, want, and addiction in a rural Kentucky trailer park—and the upper-middle-class opulence of Brian’s beach home outside Houston. One of Beyah’s greatest challenges, as she goes from being a person who steals a piece of bread meant for seagulls to sitting at a table in a Red Lobster and devouring a shrimp platter, is negotiating the distinction between poverty and opulence and navigating the realities that the consequences for being poor are extremely high.
This is made clear in various moments, such as when Samson ends up in jail and cannot afford representation, or when Buzz, the chief of police in Beyah’s hometown, suggests to Beyah that she can avoid paying funeral costs for her mother by not going to the funeral home. When Samson finds the bones of his father, Rake, who died during Hurricane Ike and was not formally searched for due to his lack of permanent residence, he puts his remains in the ocean rather than allowing the state to bury him in a public grave with no marker. Poverty means that necessities, like a lawyer when one is accused or a respectful, traditional burial, are not able to be accessed by these characters.
The novel takes a compassionate look at these inequalities through the struggles of Samson in the legal system. Beyah sees that Samson has no parent to raise him, no advocates to advise or protect him, and no source of money to provide for his needs—in her estimation, he was doing the best he could in a system that would punish him no matter what choice he made, once he became indigent. The novel depicts his choices as necessary and unavoidable, even if wrong.
While Beyah is relieved to move from a place of deprivation to a place of privilege, she remains starkly aware of her background and of the prejudice people of means carry toward those who come from a place of want, and she works to become a voice for those in poverty. When Samson leaves prison, he feels unworthy of the gift of Marjorie’s house, due to his background of deprivation. By this point, however, Beyah’s perspective has changed, and she can calmly encourage him to accept this gift, which changes his class position and gives him the security he never had.
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By Colleen Hoover
