Madison Love

Quick Facts

• Role: Eldest child of Alice Love and Nick Love
• Age: Ten during the main timeline; a poised university student by the Epilogue
• First appearance: Chapter 5 (school photograph)
• Key ties: Her parents, younger siblings Tom and Olivia, and family friend Gina Boyle
• Defining image: The “Sultana” grown up—no longer a dreamt-of baby, but a complicated, hurting child

Who They Are

Bold, prickly, and fiercely alive, Madison Love is the most jarring proof of the decade Alice has lost. To the 29-year-old Alice, Madison is the startling transformation of the longed-for “Sultana” into a ten-year-old whose sullenness, intelligence, and volatility refuse to fit the romanticized vision of motherhood. The first glimpse of her—shoelaces undone, knee grazed, face set—collides with the tidy life Alice once imagined and forces a reckoning with real family life rather than its fantasy. Madison also functions as a living fault line where her parents’ conflict has cracked the home, tying her growth to the novel’s meditation on Memory and Identity. By the end, the gawky child “all knee and ponytail” has become “all legs and cheekbones and opinions,” the same intensity refined rather than erased.

Personality & Traits

Madison feels everything at full volume—hunger, humiliation, pride, love—and her responses can be exhilarating or explosive. Her brilliance and creativity make her formidable; her perfectionism and pain make her fragile. The tension between those qualities animates nearly every scene she’s in.

• Intense and moody: Elisabeth observes that Madison “feels everything very deeply” (Chapter 6). We see it in her passionate fixation on cooking and in the sudden swings to fury—like slamming, sulking, or going silent—whenever she feels misunderstood or slighted.
• Perceptive and intelligent: Madison is the first to clock the truth about Alice’s head injury, telling her flatly, “You don’t remember us, do you?” (Chapter 20). Her quickness is later affirmed when she wins a school-wide oratory competition, and Frannie’s friend Xavier notes she’s “a very complex, intelligent little girl” (Chapter 35).
• Creative and perfectionistic: She invents recipes and commits to them like a chef; when the result isn’t flawless, she can’t bear it—Elisabeth recalls her throwing away a cake she’d labored over because it wasn’t perfect.
• Vulnerable and volatile: Madison’s temper covers shame and grief. After taunts about being “the ugliest girl in the whole school,” she snaps and cuts Chloe Harper’s hair (Chapter 28), later describing the pressure inside her head “like it was going to explode.”

Character Journey

Madison’s arc traces a shift from armored anger to open connection. At first she’s a stranger to Alice—an “unknown child” whose heaviness embodies everything the amnesiac Alice fears about who she became. Parenting her without the past decade’s resentments, Alice slowly meets the person behind the scowl: a sensitive, exacting girl furious at chaos she didn’t cause. The school incident with Chloe Harper exposes the depth of that hurt and forces Alice and Nick to act together. Their impromptu whale-watching trip becomes a rare pocket of uncomplicated awe; Madison’s delighted “Look, Mum! Look!” punctures months of tension and reminds all three what joy feels like. From there, small, consistent repairs accumulate—listening, cooking together, showing up—until the intensity that once combusted starts to fuel achievement and connection instead. By the epilogue, Madison’s confidence and success don’t erase her complicated past; they metabolize it, echoing the novel’s faith in Forgiveness and Second Chances and in the hard-won Evolution of Love and Marriage.

Key Relationships

Madison’s relationships are pressure gauges for the family—registering fracture, repair, and everything in between.

• Alice Love: Madison resents the “new” version of her mother—the thin, harried, quick-tempered woman who broke promises and, in Madison’s mind, broke the family. Amnesia resets their dynamic; as Alice parents with curiosity rather than defensiveness, Madison begins to risk trust again. Their bond heals not through grand gestures but through small fulfillments of past promises—ingredients bought, shows attended, apologies offered and meant.
• Nick Love: She adores her father and aches for his return. With him, Madison is more candid, but his absence is a constant bruise; she both longs for and doubts the possibility of “home” being restored. The beach trip after the school incident shows how his steadiness, paired with Alice’s renewed presence, can make her feel safe enough to be joyful.
• Tom and Olivia: As the oldest, Madison oscillates between dismissive superiority and protective loyalty toward her younger siblings. She can snap at them, then quietly help—like coaching Olivia through a dance routine—revealing that beneath the prickles she still wants to lead and belong.
• Gina Boyle: Witnessing Gina’s death deposits unprocessed trauma in Madison’s life. Nightmares and hair-trigger reactions signal grief she can’t yet name, intensifying her volatility and shaping the stakes of her parents’ care.

Defining Moments

Madison’s story turns on scenes that expose her pain and then channel her intensity into connection.

• Discovering the school photo (Chapter 5): Alice stares at a daughter she doesn’t recognize—“a chunky, stolid-looking girl…shoelaces undone.” Why it matters: the shock externalizes the lost decade and frames Madison as both mystery and mirror.
• The bullying incident (Chapter 28): After Chloe Harper’s taunts, Madison cuts off her hair. Why it matters: the act is a flare of unmanaged shame and grief, forcing the adults to confront the depth of Madison’s distress and to parent as a team.
• Whale watching (Chapter 28): On the beach, Madison’s radiant joy—“Look, Mum! Look!”—momentarily dissolves her defenses. Why it matters: the scene proves that shared wonder can thaw entrenched hurt and reattach parent and child.
• The oratory competition (Chapter 35): Madison’s victory, later spotlighted in the epilogue by her parents’ shared pride, showcases her intellect harnessed for creation, not explosion. Why it matters: achievement becomes a site of family reconnection rather than pressure.

Essential Quotes

Alice turned the photo over and saw there was a typewritten label stuck to the back. It said: Children (left to right): Olivia Love (Kindergarten), Tom Love (Yr4B), Madison Love (Yr5M) Parent: Alice Love Number of copies ordered: 4 Alice turned the photo back over and looked again at the three children. I have never seen you before in my life. (Chapter 5)

This moment crystallizes the uncanny gap between Alice’s self-concept and her lived life. Madison’s unfamiliar face becomes an emblem of lost time and unmet expectations, setting up the novel’s central tension: can love reconnect across memory’s rupture?

“You promised,” the Sultana said to Alice. Her eyes were murderous. She was formidable. She filled Alice with awe. “I promised what?” “That you would buy the ingredients so I could make lasagna tonight. I knew you wouldn’t do it. Why do you pretend you’re going to do something when you know that you’re not.” (Chapter 18)

Calling Alice out on a broken promise, Madison fuses childish literalness with adult-level indictment. The “Sultana” nickname underscores how the dream of a baby has become a demanding, disappointed person who measures love in reliability—ingredients purchased, commitments kept.

“You don’t remember us, do you?” (Chapter 20)

Madison’s bluntness slices through adult euphemism. Her direct naming of the crisis marks her perceptiveness and also her desperation: better a hard truth than the uncertainty of being “almost” known by your own mother.

Madison grabbed hold of Alice’s arm. Her face was radiant with joy, speckled with droplets of water. “Look, Mum! Look!” (Chapter 28)

This exclamation is Madison unarmored—curiosity and wonder rushing ahead of anger. The physical touch (“grabbed hold”) and the repeated “Look” reenact attachment in real time, showing how shared attention can rebuild trust where explanations cannot.