August is the novel’s narrator. After moving from SweetGrove, Tennessee to Brooklyn, she was in denial about her mother’s death for most of her childhood, constantly telling herself and her brother that “she’ll come tomorrow.” For solace in her loneliness, she looked to her best friends Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. These girls celebrated each other’s beauty and helped each other make it through a Brooklyn plagued by heroin, poverty, and sexual harassment and assault. As August reached maturity, she rebelled against her father’s newfound Islam faith and fooled around with her boyfriend, Jerome. However, unlike her friends, she was unwilling to have intercourse, and thus was able to leave the neighborhood and pursue an Ivy League education at Brown University. As an adult, she becomes an anthropologist who studies cultural conceptions of death. While she has gained the tools to deal with her mother’s death—and her father’s—she remains haunted by the more ambiguous ends to her friendships. 

Sylvia is the center of August’s friend group. She is beautiful, with a wide mouth, straight teeth, full lips, and reddish-brown hair. Even as a girl, she has a “deep, graveled”