Dicey Tillerman
The novel’s protagonist is thirteen-year-old Dicey who is a paragon of self-assured obliviousness to those things which drive the very life engine of many girls her age. Her defining physical feature is a haircut universally agreed upon as being much more at home atop a boy. But Dicey doesn’t really truck with all that folderol over cosmetic appearance. She has more important things to worry about, such as keeping a family together in the face of a mentally disturbed mother’s inability to do so herself. She is an iconic portrait of the tough, clear-minded, commonsensical eldest sibling faced with the unfair responsibility of being a mother because life dealt her cards that won’t allow her to play the role she was actually born into.
Liza Tillerman
Better known as Momma, Liza is the problematic matriarch of the tight-knit Tillerman siblings. She is a more an oxymoron come to life than an active character: she is an absent presence hanging over the narrative. Unlike her eldest, Liza was given to irresponsibility and a sort of rebellious flightiness most perfectly characterized by her breathtaking rejection of the possibility of marriage because the marital strife of her own parents taught her a bitter lesson in matrimonial bliss or the absence thereof. As is often the case, however, Momma’s behavior turns out not to be driven by intent but shaped by forces within beyond her control.
James Tillerman
James is Liza’s eldest son, second in lineage behind Dicey. He is much more akin to his mother than his sister: an alienated dreamer who chooses self-exile from the social constraints that would normally be placed upon him rather than his sister. Smart, artistic, and with a desire to respect people based on intellect rather than the usual more simplistic means of judging character, James is not cut out for the world he inherited. He is an ancient soul trapped inside the body of a twelve-year-old boy.
Maybeth Tillerman
Maybeth is the younger sister of Dicey and James. She is prettier than Dicey, but hampered by a stultifying shyness that almost inevitably get confused as intellectual incapacity on the part of the school system. In addition to being pretty, she’s also blessed with the voice of an angel and almost preternatural empathic sense of others. She is most definitely not “slow.”
Abigail Tillerman
The strain imposed upon Liza by the marital difficulties of her own parents which drove her to reject the entire institution serves to create a situation where the Tillerman kids are as ignorant of “Gram” as she is of them. An entire marriage spent bending to the patriarchal will of a husband of dubious worth only served to also alienate Abigail from her not just Liza, but Liza’s own sibling. The bad marriage has been a domestic Frankenstein story in which Gram is a bitter creature constructed partly of stubborn determination shared with Dicey and the easy rejection of responsibility shared with James.
Eunice
In the wake of the utter collapse of Liza’s capacity for being a responsible mother, the kids wind up the stewardship of Abigail’s niece, Eunice. She is the polar opposite of James, rejecting intellectual curiosity for the safe confines of Catholic dogma and ritual. Her pious commitment to Christianity hardly means that she isn’t hypocritical about her expectations of demonstrations of gratitude on the part of the kids who neither expected nor asked to find themselves dumped on her doorstep. It is revealed that Eunice’s paint-by-numbers approach Christian charity is due in large part to the influence of the well-intentioned but out-of-his-depth Father Joseph, her priestly guide for what Jesus would do. (Spoiler: Jesus probably wouldn’t do things like Father Joseph does.)
