Maeve Fly

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, rape, graphic violence, death, illness, substance use, and cursing.

Maeve is the protagonist and first-person narrator of the novel. Little physical description is given of her other than that she looks like her grandmother, Tallulah, and is 27 years old. She works as the ice princess at a themed amusement park, a job that she loves as it confirms one of her core beliefs about the world: Everyone is pretending to be someone else. Maeve slowly reveals her history to the reader, initially hinting obliquely that she has a “dark” side before violently killing Hilda and informing the reader that she has killed multiple people before. She came to live with Tallulah after she was disowned by her family and then learned from her how to be a serial killer. Some of the bones in her cellar are “the ones [her] grandmother taught [her] to kill because she said one day that [she] would need to know how to do it and how to dispose of them after” (262).

Maeve’s greatest fear throughout the novel is being left alone, with no one in her life who understands her.