Summary

The first chapter of Jacqueline Woodson’s novel introduces the major players and events of the story without fully explaining their significance. The story is narrated past-tense using first-person point of view from a point 20 years after the major events. August had returned to Brooklyn from abroad to bury her father and clean out her childhood home. As she talked with her younger brother over dinner at a local diner after the services, she remembered snippets of their shared childhood. They talked about her brother's wife and his soon-to-be-born child, and he gently urged her to return to the Islamic faith he lives by.

We learn that their father raised them, presumably after their mother’s death, but we do not know when or how long ago their mother died. Their shared childhood was not tragic as they experienced it, but now, examining the...