59 pages • 1 hour read
Tillie ColeA Thousand Broken Pieces
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Stars/Northern Lights
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, death, and death by suicide.
In A Thousand Boy Kisses, Poppy draws comfort from her strong belief in the Christian conception of heaven, God, and the afterlife. Savannah, though, never fully believes in Poppy’s religious interpretation of death, and she explicitly doubts this version of the afterlife in the sequel. However, Savannah finds a substitute for Poppy’s idea of heaven in the idea of “energy,” specifically as it manifests in the stars and the northern lights. Savannah frequently describes Poppy either as a star, as living among the stars, or as having dispersed, as energy, into the cosmos. In particular, the pink ribbon of light that she sees amid the northern lights becomes a physical manifestation of Poppy’s afterlife, providing comfort and support to Savannah as she struggles to understand her place in the world without Poppy.
The significance of the stars and the northern lights as symbols, though, is not just that they represent Poppy. In the Epilogue, Savannah says that all her lost loved ones, including Cillian, are among the stars. As such, stars symbolize a broader faith in some form of afterlife. In the 
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