August Charles Character Analysis

August is Monday’s little brother; he’s three or four years younger than her. He’s a wild child who can never sit still and is always a mess, which Monday finds difficult to deal with. Monday is tasked with looking after him after school, and Claudia thinks that their relationship looks more like a dictatorship than a sibling relationship. August suddenly goes missing in the winter when he’s nine, and Monday is unwilling to tell Claudia what happened to him or where he went. Claudia doesn’t learn until more than a year later that Mrs. Charles murdered August to punish him for attacking his sisters and forced April, August’s other older sister, to stuff his body in the freezer. His disappearance goes unnoticed and uninvestigated for more than a year. The investigation uncovers evidence that both he and Monday suffered extreme physical abuse until their deaths—but because of all the physical trauma on their bodies, it’s impossible to definitively identify the cause of death.