You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

Feyi’s endgame love match, Alim Blake, is a celebrity chef with two Michelin stars who lives in a mansion full of art on an unidentified Caribbean Island. He is the father of Nasir, whom Feyi is dating, and Lorraine, who lives in the old family house in town. His wife, Marisol, died in a swimming accident 20 years earlier. He had a brief relationship with a man named Devon, but because his children objected to the relationship, he was forced to end it.

He is an artist when it comes to food and expresses himself through his cooking as well as his makeup and clothing. He is handsome, kind, and open with Feyi about his grief and his pain, helping Feyi talk through her guilt about being alive after Jonah. His use of color in his food and makeup appeals to the artist in Feyi. In keeping with romance tropes, it is love at first sight for Feyi, and when she first sees Alim, he appears to be radiating power and charisma. He turns out, however, not to be the traditional romance alpha character as he first appears. Rather, he is both in touch with and in control of his emotions. He has let his grief teach him compassion for others, which is why he can connect so deeply, and so quickly, with Feyi.

Feyi’s best friend and former lover Joy fills the romance trope of the perfect cheerleader and support system for the protagonist. She is a character who most embodies the themes of The Importance of Friendship. Aside from this, she also exists to contrast Feyi’s more careful, grieving self, as Joy’s character is exactly as her name implies. Her enthusiasm for life is evident in her colorful language, the way she aggressively pursues anyone beautiful around her, and her carefree alcohol and drug consumption. While Joy is often flippant and vulgar, she ultimately cares about her friend. Even when she disagrees with Feyi’s actions, she ultimately never expresses anything other than acceptance.

Along with Alim and Feyi, Joy represents the unique experiences of LGBTQ+ members of the Black diaspora. Joy has a predilection for women in heterosexual marriages, but the novel implies that part of the attraction stems from the complicated relationship her Ghanaian culture has with LGBTQ+ people. The woman Joy gets involved with during the novel breaks her heart but seems to come around, implying a happy ending for Joy as well. Feyi delves into her friend’s psychology by considering her upbringing and traditional Ghanian expectations of sexuality as the keys to her attraction to her current girlfriend.

Nasir is the 27-year-old son of Alim Blake. He lives in New York and is friends with Feyi’s first post-marriage fling, Milan. He shows his willingness to betray his friend the first time he sees Feyi, however, the moment Feyi and Milan split he asks Feyi to dinner. His attraction to her is evident from the moment they lock eyes across the bar, a romance trope that misleads the reader into thinking Nasir may be the lead love interest for Feyi. He shows kindness and patience once Feyi reveals her struggle to overcome her first husband’s death, and they interact mostly as friends for the first part of the book until Nasir invites her to his family home and helps get her into the museum’s exhibition.

The novel implies that Nasir is less complex than Feyi and those around her who have experienced grief, and even his friend Milan says that Nasir’s happy life disqualifies him from being the right man for Feyi. The warning signs of his immaturity are sprinkled throughout: His willingness to pull Feyi away from his friend, the fact that he does not open his car door for her, and that he does not understand the artists Feyi loves are all major warning signs in the romance genre. He is naturally furious when he finds out Feyi and his father have fallen in love, and while the book does not resolve this relationship, it implies that Nasir is coming to terms with it and may grow through the experience, becoming a more complex and empathetic person in the end.

Feyi’s first steps back into the world of the living after her husband dies are with Milan, whom she hooks up with immediately after meeting him at a party. He is handsome, kind, has roots in the South, and is just as unwilling as Feyi to take their relationship to a deeper level. When Feyi breaks it off he seems fine with being friends, and a few weeks later he reveals he is trying to get back together with an old girlfriend, something Feyi knew nothing about. Nasir also later reveals his deep pain both with this issue and through losing a child whom he worked with at his job.

He unexpectedly returns at the end of the novel with a phone call to Feyi, telling her has heard about her situation with Nasir and his father. Despite being Nasir’s friend, he tells Feyi he thinks it is good she is trying to live her life. He encourages her to do what she feels is right, even if it is messy. He is a good example of the theme The Importance of Friendship, as he says he will support Nasir and get him through the hard time, despite knowing it is the best thing for him and Feyi both.