Previous
Wallow Heartland
Olivia Lark Heartland was the younger sister of Wallow and Timothy. An ethereal, imaginative, and otherworldly child, she frequently lost herself in games of make-believe or invented magical imaginary worlds for herself. She always had an affinity for water, especially the ocean. Her brothers adored her. She died when the crab sled she was riding was swept out to sea by an especially strong new-moon tide.
Olivia Heartland Quotes in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
The St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves quotes below are all either spoken by Olivia Heartland or refer to Olivia Heartland. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
2. Haunting Olivia Quotes
Getting used to aquatic ghosts is like adjusting to the temperature of the ocean. It takes a few more close encounters with the lambent fish before my pulse quiets down. Once I realize that the ghost fish can’t hurt me, I relax into something I’d call delight if I weren’t supposed to be feeling breathless and bereaved.
I spend the next two hours pretending to look for Olivia. I shadow the spirit manatees, their back scored with keloid stars from motorboat propellers. I somersault through stingrays. Bonefish flicker around me like mute banshees. I figure out how to braid the furry blue light of dead coral reef through my fingertips, and very nearly giggle. I’ve started to enjoy myself and I’ve nearly succeeded in exorcising Olivia from my thoughts, when a bunch of ghost shrimp materialize in front of my goggles […]
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
I loved Olivia. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t recognize that she was one weird little kid. She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, “I wanna go home! I wanna go home!” Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Olivia was an adoptee from some other planet. […] She played “house” by getting the broom and sweeping the neon corpses of dead jellyfish off the beach. Her eyes were a stripey cerulean, inhumanly bright. Dad used to tell Olivia that a merman artisan had made them, out of bits of sea glass from Atlantis.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
The question has been weighing on my mind more and more heavily of late. Because let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that there is a Glowworm Grotto, and that Olivia’s ghost haunts it. Then what? Do we genie-in-a-bottle her? Keep her company on weekends? I envision eternal Saturday nights spent treading cold water in a cave, crooning lullabies to the husk of Olivia, and shudder.
“What do you mean?” Wallow says, frowning. “We’ll rescue her. We’ll preserve her, uh, you know, her memory.”
“And how exactly do you propose we do that?”
“I don’t know, bro!” Wallow furrows his brow, flustered. You can tell he hasn’t thought much beyond finding Olivia. “We’ll…we’ll put her in an aquarium.”
It seems to me that nobody’s asking the hard questions here. For example, what if ghost-Olivia doesn’t have eyes anymore? Or a nose?
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Olivia Heartland Character Timeline in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
The timeline below shows where the character Olivia Heartland appears in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
2. Haunting Olivia
Two years earlier, Timothy and Wallow’s sister, Olivia Lark Heartland, was swept out to sea. Since then, their parents, Mr. Heartland and Mrs....
(full context)
...moment that Gannon finds the boys trespassing. Realizing who they are and what they’re after (Olivia’s body, which was never found, thanks to Tropical Storm Vita, which interrupted the search and...
(full context)
...water. He thinks he sees the silvery light of moonbeams. But it’s the new moon. Olivia disappeared on a new-moon night, too, swept out to sea on the “spring tide,” the...
(full context)
...and rays. He forgets to be sad and that he’s supposed to be looking for Olivia. At least, he forgets until a school of ghostly shrimp swim into view spelling out...
(full context)
Glowworm Grotto was a place Olivia depicted in drawings. Neither Timothy nor Wallow thought it was a real place, since Olivia...
(full context)
...takes a pitiless, no-nonsense attitude toward most things. Looking at the drawings, she remarks on Olivia’s lack of artistic talent (and, for that matter, swimming ability). But then she recognizes the...
(full context)
...to Granana, Timothy reflects on how hard Mr. Heartland took not being able to bury Olivia’s body. Timothy knows it must have sunk to the bottom or washed up somewhere very...
(full context)
...haven’t signed the waivers or taken the sea safety classes required by local law since Olivia’s death. Night after night, the brothers slowly explore the island’s coast, looking for Olivia. On...
(full context)
...wakes to hear Wallow talking to himself, saying how badly he wants to apologize to Olivia. Then, the brothers notice a tiny cave entrance, just at water level, illuminated from within....
(full context)
...follow it. He does, but he can’t tell the living fish from the ghost ones. Olivia, he thinks, “could be everywhere.”
(full context)
