Genre
Bildungsroman
Setting and Context
Set in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the late 20th century.
Narrator and Point of View
Narrator: August;
Point of View: First-person
Tone and Mood
Candid, Pensive, Dark, Tragic
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: August; Antagonist: Trauma and challenges of womanhood.
Major Conflict
The story follows the young womanhood of four friends, each with their own trauma, navigating the treacherous streets filled with poverty, violence, and desperation. Their lives once entangled are disconnected as they approach adulthood with a tragic event at the center of it all.
Climax
The climax reaches when Gigi jumps off the hotel floor committing suicide after her friends fail to see her performance in the musical.
Foreshadowing
Gigi's tragic death is foreshadowed with the mention of a dark past that connects the girls.
Understatement
“Who was there to see Gigi lift her heels up and fly?”
August refers to Gigi’s suicide at the Chelsea Hotel.
Allusions
“The world’s not as safe as you all like to believe it is, he said. Look at Biafra, he said. Look at Vietnam.”
The novel alludes to the Biafra-Nigerian Civil War and the Vietnam War indicating the time period to be in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Imagery
“She had aged beautifully in the twenty years since I’d last seen her. Her reddish brown hair was cut short now, curly and streaked with gray. Her skin, still eerily bronze against those light eyes, was now etched through with fine wrinkles. Maybe she felt me watching her because she glanced up suddenly, recognized me, and smiled. For several slow seconds, the years fell away and she was Sylvia again, nearly fifteen in her St. Thomas Aquinas school uniform—green and blue plaid skirt, white blouse, and plaid cross bow tie, her belly just beginning to round.”
Paradox
“For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.”
August lives in denial that her mother is alive and will show up eventually though she had been dead all through.
Parallelism
“You were wrong, Mama. Look at us hugging. Look at us laughing. Look how we begin and end each other.”
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle…”
The bottle and needle are a synecdoche for alcohol and drugs.
Personification
“From that window, from July until end of summer, we saw Brooklyn turn a heartrending pink at the beginning of each day and sink into a stunning gray-blue at dusk.”
