Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, substance use, mental illness, antigay bias, death, suicide, rape, and sexual violence.

Sade is the protagonist of Where Sleeping Girls Lie. At the start of the novel, she is entering her third year of high school at Alfred Nobel Academy after being homeschooled for her entire adolescence. Growing up, Sade always felt like she was “cursed,” a belief instilled by her father and aunt, who believed that twins were “split to purge the evil part of the soul” and Sade was “the bad one” (310).

Bad luck seems to follow Sade everywhere she goes, and by the time she arrives at ANA, she has experienced a significant amount of loss and trauma in her young life. When she was 10, Sade’s mother died by suicide. Her twin sister also died by suicide the year before Sade began school, and her father died of a heart attack, grieving the loss of his favorite daughter. Because she believes that she is “the bad omen” (137), Sade feels responsible for these tragedies, as if she somehow caused them. She also experiences other lingering effects of her trauma, including panic attacks and hallucinations of her dead sister.