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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sky So Heavy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Disillusionment and Self-Reliance
Morality and Faith
Romance and Catastrophe
Crisis and the Arts
Summary
Analysis
Back in the present, the man with the gun continues screaming at Fin, grabbing Fin’s hair and wrenching his head back.
The brief shift forward in time reminds the reader that some very bad things are coming Fin’s way. This builds tension in the novel’s main story, which takes place three months prior.
Active
Themes
Three months earlier, Fin finds Lucy after class, and they have a productive study session in the library. Fin is briefly disappointed that the session hasn’t turned romantic as he expected, and he wonders if he’d been interpreting Lucy’s signals all wrong.
Fin deals with the normal awkwardness and uncertainty of teen romance.
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Themes
Lucy then asks Fin about his sketches, and Fin explains that he likes to sketch people he knows together with objects that abstractly represent them, like his mother Libby with a giant alarm clock or a birdcage. He tells Lucy about how his mother abruptly left his family two years ago, leaving behind a note for his father Greg explaining her decision. Fin found and read the note before his father got to it, something he now regrets. He explains that his mother is a very smart woman who felt that having a family was stifling her potential.
Lucy sympathizes with Fin’s pain over being abandoned. She tells him how she writes songs to process her own struggles, like when her sister nearly died from an eating disorder. As they talk, Fin feels that Lucy is illuminating parts of his mind for the first time; he can never talk about these issues with his crude friends like Lokey.
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Themes
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Just as Fin leans in to kiss Lucy, he gets a call from his mother. Panicked, she tells him to get as much food and bottled water as he can and hurry home. She explains that something has gone wrong with the nuclear testing and that regions in north and central Asia have been hit. She has not been able to reach Max on the phone.
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Themes
As Fin gets off the phone, the school alarm sounds, ordering all students into the courtyard, but Fin convinces Lucy to leave the building with him right away. Outside, the sky has a disturbing glow. They stop at the store to get food, seeing that aisles are already half-empty. Fin tries to reassure Lucy that everything will be OK, but in truth he has no idea. They get on the bus and share an awkwardly silent ride home. Fin helps carry some of Lucy’s groceries to her door. As she goes inside, she kisses him on the cheek and says goodbye.
