The Sky is Everywhere Themes

The Sky is Everywhere Themes

Abandonment

The Sky is Everywhere is packed with abandonment. There's the obvious: Lennie and Bailey's absent mother, who left when Lennie was one, supposedly because she had the family's "restless gene." And,...

Identity

In The Sky is Everywhere, before her sister died, Lennie thought of herself in terms of Bailey. She was Bailey's sister first, and her own person second. She even curbed her dreams because they wer...

Philosophical Viewpoints

It's tough to find a book about death that doesn't ask the Big Questions. You know: Where do we go after we die? Why are we here? How do we live fulfilling lives? That sort of thing. And The Sky is...

Love

Ah, young love. In The Sky is Everywhere, Lennie's love for Joe is one of the most important threads in the story. For readers, it balances out all the death talk nicely, and it seems to do the sam...

Man and the Natural World

Okay Shmoopers, here's a something you should know about nature in The Sky is Everywhere: It's more than just nature. It's magical, sometimes literally. And because Lennie's narrating the story, th...

Guilt and Blame

Aside from grief, one of the main emotions Lennie feels in The Sky is Everywhere is guilt. Fun combination, right? But it could be argued that Lennie does a lot of guilt-worthy things. There's the...

Dreams, Hopes, and Plans

When Bailey died, Lennie didn't know what Bailey's dreams were, because Bailey never told her. Because of this, a mystery-like subplot of The Sky is Everywhere is Lennie trying to figure out what B...

Mortality

One of the more in-your-face themes in The Sky is Everywhere is mortality—and not in a-people-coping-with-the-idea-that-they-will-someday-die type of way. The book is all about how death affects...