Character Analysis
Leon: Resilience and Loyalty
Leon is nine years old, mixed-race, and the novel’s focaliser. Everything the reader knows is filtered through his understanding. He is defined by two qualities above all: fierce loyalty to Jake, and extraordinary resilience in the face of a system that repeatedly fails him.
Leon’s loyalty and resilience exist in tension. His loyalty drives him to fight for Jake — which the system labels as ‘difficult behaviour.’ His resilience allows him to survive, but surviving means gradually accepting a life without his brother. De Waal shows that the qualities the system punishes (determination, anger) are the same qualities keeping Leon alive.
Leon’s naïveté is crucial to De Waal’s method. He does not understand racism, class, mental illness, or institutional failure as concepts. He simply experiences their effects. This makes him a powerful vehicle for social criticism because the reader can see what Leon cannot, creating both empathy and outrage.
Part 1: Leon is a protector — defined entirely by his relationship to Jake and Carol. He is capable, resourceful, and unnervingly adult in his caring responsibilities.
Part 2: Separated from Jake, Leon struggles with identity. His behaviour deteriorates as grief and anger find no productive outlet. He oscillates between accepting Maureen’s love and rejecting it out of guilt.
Part 3: Leon becomes more defiant and purposeful. His quest for Jake gives him direction. During the riots, he experiences a fusion of personal and political anger that matures his understanding. By the ending, he has not ‘healed’ — but he has survived, which is itself an act of resistance.
Jake: Innocence and Loss
Jake is a baby — he has no voice, no agency, and no understanding of what is happening to him. He functions in the novel primarily as an emblem of what Leon is fighting to keep. Jake represents innocence, family, and everything the system takes from Leon.
Crucially, Jake’s whiteness makes him visible to the system in ways Leon is not. He is adopted by a middle-class family who can provide material comfort but not the sibling bond that Leon offers. De Waal uses Jake to expose the care system’s racial hierarchy: a white baby is a ‘success story’ for adoption statistics, while a mixed-race older child is a ‘difficult placement.’
Carol: Failed by Everyone
Carol is Leon and Jake’s mother. She is white, working-class, and struggling with mental health problems and substance issues. De Waal refuses to demonise her. Carol is not a bad mother — she is a woman without support, without resources, and without adequate mental health services. Her decline is the result of systemic failure, not personal wickedness.
De Waal presents Carol through Leon’s eyes — and Leon loves her. He remembers good times, moments of affection, her smell. This prevents the reader from writing Carol off as simply ‘a bad parent.’ The novel asks: who failed Carol? Where were the services, the community, the father figures?
Carol connects to themes of class, poverty, and gender. She is a single mother in Thatcher’s Britain, where welfare services are being cut. Her absent partners (both Leon’s father and Jake’s) face no consequences, while Carol bears all the responsibility and all the blame.
De Waal uses Carol to critique a system that punishes mothers for poverty rather than providing support. The care system intervenes to remove children but does nothing to address the causes of Carol’s collapse — her isolation, her untreated illness, her lack of financial stability.
Maureen: The Foster Mother
Maureen is white, warm, patient, and experienced. She represents an alternative model of care — home-based and rooted in love rather than procedure. Her home is sensory: food, warmth, comfort, conversation. She provides Leon with stability and the first genuine safety he has known. What she cannot give him is a link to his Black heritage.
However, Maureen is not idealised. She has limitations — she cannot reunite Leon with Jake, she cannot undo his trauma, and she must navigate the same institutional system that failed him. De Waal uses Maureen to show that individual love, however powerful, cannot compensate for systemic injustice.
Salma: The Social Worker
Salma, Leon’s social worker, represents the institutional system. She is not cruel — she is overworked, bound by policy, and making decisions within a framework that was never designed to serve children like Leon. De Waal presents Salma with nuance — she cares, but her caring is constrained by caseloads, budgets, and rules she did not create.
Salma’s language is significant: she uses euphemisms and bureaucratic terms that obscure what is really happening. “Permanency planning” means Leon will never go home. “Contact arrangements” means limited, supervised visits that will eventually stop. De Waal shows how institutional language can be a form of violence — removing clarity from children who deserve honesty.