August

August is the narrator and main character of Another Brooklyn. At the beginning of the book, she is a professional anthropologist, who lives overseas and travels around the world studying the rituals of death and funeral rites.

As a child, she moves from her family's land in SweetGrove, Tennessee to her father's hometown of Brooklyn, New York because August's mother becomes mentally disturbed after her brother Clyde's death in Vietnam. After Augusts mother becomes paranoid and threatens to sleep with a knife under her pillow, her father removes the family, leaving her mother behind.

August then spends her childhood and teenage years growing up in Brooklyn, where she is close friends with three neighborhood girls: Angela, Sylvia, and Gigi. Even after her mother's death, August remains unable to accept that the ashes in the urn belong to her mother. She spends her adolescent years trying to convince her...