Dancing on the Edge Characters

Miracle is a girl living under a ton of pressure. For one thing, she was born under impossible circumstances and really shouldn't even be alive right now—her mother died while she was pregnant—...

To say that Gigi is Miracle's crazy grandma doesn't even begin to do this lady justice. Normally, her obsession with occult rituals and superstitions about colors and numbers would just make people...

Miracle's first meeting with Granddaddy Opal doesn't exactly promise a loving relationship. He catches her falling down the stairs of the basement when she's going to look for Dane's stuff and tell...

Talk about transformation. At the beginning of the book, Aunt Casey is "tall and slim and stiff-legged in her too-high heels" (1.21), and according to Miracle, resembles a Barbie doll. She's spitef...

At the beginning of the book, Dane comes out of his lair in the basement, smokes a cigarette, makes a sarcastic remark to Gigi… and then disappears. We may never find out exactly where he ran off...

Thanks to books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Bell Jar, mental hospitals have a pretty bad rep in literature. Their characters endure harsh electroshock treatments; evil, power-...

An aging newspaper deliveryman and a young gospel singer don't exactly scream love story to us, but there's no denying that Emmaline Wilson is Granddaddy Opal's girlfriend—and when she comes into...

It's bizarre enough that Gigi meets her future husband, Eugene Wadell, at a paranormal conference—this alone tells us that this guy is at least a bit of a weirdo—but it doesn't stop there. Acco...

Ever had somebody stare at you? Like, watch you really intently like they're taking mental notes about your activities so they can stalk you or steal your embarrassing collection of 90s boy band CD...

Miracle's mother, Sissy, is probably the most mysterious character in the entire novel, mainly because of the pact Gigi and Casey have made to basically erase her from their lives. Still, just from...

Susan is Miracle's teacher in her secret dance lessons Granddaddy Opal signs her up for while she's in Georgia. She's a free spirit whose incredible ability to bust a move inspires Miracle to awake...

Uncle Toole definitely lives up to his name—the guy is a creep, a loser, and just about every other negative word you can possibly think of—and yet, at one time, Aunt Casey was in love with him...