The protagonist, Queenie, references the hero archetype, as she overcomes severe personal challenges throughout the story. Queenie is Black Jamaican woman in her mid-twenties, whose family lives on the South side of London. She writes for a newspaper that doesn’t give her as much opportunity to write about important topics as she’d anticipated. She wears her hair in twists and is bigger than many of her friends, at a size 14. Queenie has a troubled past, with a negligent father and an abusive stepfather who ripped her once-loving mother away from her; while Queenie’s tactic for coping with this trauma is to pretend it never happened, it deeply impacts how she forms relationships and moves through the world. Queenie often uses dark humor and sarcasm to either distract from hard topics and emotions or point out how the things that other people say are offensive. The story starts as Queenie is reaching a breaking point with her pattern of pushing emotions away. When her boyfriend asks to take a break, her sense of self-worth starts to slip, and she spirals into a state of sadness.