Explore the real-world places that appear in Take What You Can by Naima Coster. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Brooklyn Brownstone Neighborhood, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Restaurant Row, Brooklyn Public Library — Central Branch, Marseille, France and 8 more.
Fort Greene / Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn — Val and Milly's new domestic world
When Milly persuades Val to move to New York, it is the brownstone blocks of Brooklyn that become the stage for their reimagined friendship. The two women — each pregnant with a daughter — navigate the cobblestone streets and stoop-lined blocks as they attempt to rebuild a decade-long gap into daily proximity. Val, always the outsider in Milly's curated world, feels the weight of class difference most acutely here, where the brownstones signal a social capital she has never quite attained.
Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy are among Brooklyn's oldest and most storied neighborhoods, with brownstone rowhouses dating to the mid-19th century. They became centers of Black cultural and intellectual life through the 20th century, home to generations of writers, artists, and activists.
These neighborhoods remain some of Brooklyn's most sought-after residential areas, though rapid gentrification has dramatically shifted their demographics. Landmarked brownstones line streets like Carlton Avenue and Hancock Street, and the area pulses with independent restaurants, bookshops, and community spaces.
Visit: Fort Greene Historic District (historic site)
Prospect Park West, Brooklyn — Stroller walks and charged conversations
The sprawling greenery of Prospect Park provides a backdrop for Val and Milly's walks with their daughters, the kind of mundane intimacy that tests whether their friendship can survive the daily pressures of new motherhood. Here, surrounded by other Brooklyn parents, the class divide between them is thrown into relief — Milly with her influencer polish and restaurant-world connections, Val quietly calculating how long she can afford to stay in the city on a journalist's salary.
Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and completed in 1867, Prospect Park was conceived as a democratic green space for all Brooklynites. Its Long Meadow, boathouse, and Lullwater have anchored neighborhood life for over 150 years.
Prospect Park remains Brooklyn's most beloved public park, drawing millions of visitors annually. The Prospect Park Alliance maintains its trails, the Audubon Center boathouse, and a winter ice skating rink, making it a genuine community hub.
Visit: Prospect Park (park)
Smith Street / Atlantic Avenue area — Milly's world of restaurant royalty
Milly is married into what the novel calls 'restaurant royalty,' and the upscale dining world of Brooklyn becomes shorthand for her social sphere and the life Val struggles to fit into. The restaurants her husband operates represent a kind of abundance that Milly has always reached for — the same hunger that once drew both women to Helene in France. For Val, these spaces feel both glamorous and alienating, a reminder of the distance between her ambitions and her bank account.
Smith Street in Carroll Gardens became Brooklyn's first serious restaurant corridor in the late 1990s, earning the nickname 'Restaurant Row.' Atlantic Avenue has historically been a multicultural food corridor, with Middle Eastern markets coexisting alongside newer fine-dining establishments.
The area remains one of Brooklyn's most vibrant dining destinations, with acclaimed restaurants from Brooklyn Fare to Colonie drawing a discerning clientele. The neighborhood's food scene continues to set trends across New York City.
Visit: Smith Street Restaurant District (landmark)
Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn — Val's refuge as a journalist
Val, the journalist of the pair, is a woman who has always relied on her own intellect and research rather than social connections to move through the world. The library and its resources represent the self-made path she has carved — the counterpoint to Milly's world of influencer sponsorships and inherited restaurant prestige. As Val questions whether she fits into Milly's new life, spaces like this one anchor her sense of who she is outside of the friendship.
The Brooklyn Public Library's Central Branch at Grand Army Plaza opened in 1941, designed in a Beaux-Arts style with Art Deco detailing. Its bronze entrance doors depicting scenes from great works of American literature are among Brooklyn's most striking architectural features.
The Central Branch remains one of New York City's great public libraries, housing over 1.5 million items and hosting hundreds of public programs annually, including an acclaimed literary events series. It anchors the junction of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway.
Visit: Brooklyn Public Library — Grand Army Plaza (library)
Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône — Gateway city of the study-abroad trip
Marseille sits at the threshold of the novel's pivotal past — the port city through which Val and Milly first arrived in southern France as young study-abroad students. It is here, amid the noise and salt air of France's oldest city, that two motherless Black women found themselves bonded by their shared outsider status in a group of American students. The city carries the energy of their younger selves: hungry, unmoored, and open to whoever might take them in.
Founded by Greek colonists around 600 BCE, Marseille is France's oldest city and its second largest. A major Mediterranean port, it has always been a city of arrivals and departures, shaped by waves of immigration from North Africa, southern Europe, and the Caribbean.
Marseille is a vibrant, multicultural city that was named European Capital of Culture in 2013. The Vieux-Port remains its social heart, and the city's booming food scene, contemporary art institutions like MuCEM, and dramatic coastal geography attract visitors from around the world.
Visit: Vieux-Port de Marseille (landmark)
Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône — Study-abroad setting where the friendship began
Aix-en-Provence is the likely hub of Val and Milly's study-abroad program, a city built for the life of the mind — home to Cézanne, to plane-tree-lined boulevards, to café tables where young women can reinvent themselves. It is here that they bonded as the only Black students in their group, their shared marginality becoming the foundation of a friendship that felt like sisterhood. It is also here that they first encountered Helene, the older woman who took them under her wing and changed everything.
Aix-en-Provence has been a center of learning and culture since its founding as a Roman city in 123 BCE. The Université d'Aix-Marseille, one of France's oldest universities, has drawn international students for centuries, making the city a natural setting for study-abroad programs.
Aix-en-Provence remains one of France's most beautiful and intellectually vibrant cities, its Cours Mirabeau lined with cafés and bookshops. The city draws hundreds of thousands of tourists and students annually, and its weekly markets and Cézanne museum are beloved landmarks.
Visit: Cours Mirabeau, Aix-en-Provence (landmark)
Côte d'Azur coastline — The older woman's world of abundance
Helene's home — imagined here along the sun-drenched coast between Cannes and Antibes — is the novel's great origin myth. The older woman who 'showered them with money, love, and attention' becomes a surrogate mother to two motherless daughters, showing them what an independent and abundant life could look like. The villa and its glittering proximity to the sea represent a future Val and Milly reached toward but could never quite grasp without Helene's hand guiding them. Years later, the question of who they are without her haunts them both.
The Côte d'Azur between Cannes and Antibes has been a refuge for artists, writers, and wealthy expatriates since the 19th century. The region's light, warmth, and beauty famously drew Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and generations of creative people seeking transformation.
The stretch of coastline remains among the most coveted real estate in Europe, with private villas tucked behind stone walls along the Cap d'Antibes peninsula. The area is accessible by the coastal road (Route du Bord de Mer), and the beaches, markets, and galleries of Antibes are open to all visitors.
Visit: Cap d'Antibes Coastal Path (Sentier du Littoral) (park)
Promenade des Anglais, Nice — The glittering beaches of the novel
The novel's 'glittering beaches of southern France' find their fullest expression in Nice, where the Mediterranean light and the sweep of the Promenade des Anglais create a world that feels both real and fantastical. For Val and Milly as young women, these beaches represented possibility — a life beyond their origins, beyond grief, beyond the boundaries of who they were allowed to be at home. The beauty of the place is inseparable from the rift that eventually fractures them, for it was here, in this abundance, that something between them began to break.
Nice's Promenade des Anglais — named for the British aristocrats who funded its construction in the early 19th century — has been one of Europe's most iconic seafronts for over two hundred years. The city was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1860, when it was ceded to France.
Nice is France's fifth-largest city and one of its most visited, with the Promenade des Anglais drawing millions of walkers, cyclists, and sunbathers each year. The Vieux-Nice neighborhood, the Cours Saleya flower market, and the Musée Matisse make it one of France's richest cultural destinations.
Visit: Promenade des Anglais, Nice (landmark)
Boulevard de la Croisette, Cannes — Glamour and aspiration on the Riviera
Cannes, with its legendary Croisette and its theaters of aspiration and performance, resonates with the novel's themes of image-making and the desire to be seen. For Milly, who will one day become an influencer curating her own spectacular life, the glamour of the Riviera planted a seed. For Val, the journalist, Cannes represents the gap between spectacle and truth — the kind of gap she has always been trained to notice and Milly has learned to inhabit.
Cannes rose from a small fishing village to international fame after Lord Brougham was stranded there in 1834 and sparked a British aristocratic love affair with the town. Its film festival, founded in 1946, made it a global symbol of cinematic prestige and celebrity culture.
Cannes is a year-round resort city of 75,000, famous for its beaches, Michelin-starred restaurants, and luxury shopping. The Palais des Festivals hosts the annual film festival in May, and the Old Port and Marché Forville are beloved by residents and visitors alike.
Visit: Palais des Festivals et des Congrès (landmark)
Midtown Manhattan — Val's professional world as a journalist
Val's identity as a journalist anchors her sense of self against the social pressures of Milly's world. Her newsroom — placed here in Midtown, where many of New York's major media offices cluster — represents the path she carved through intellect and tenacity rather than social connection. When she moves to Brooklyn to be near Milly, the commute becomes symbolic: she is trying to inhabit two different New Yorks, two different versions of who she is, and the effort is quietly exhausting.
Midtown Manhattan has been the center of American print and broadcast journalism since the early 20th century, home to the New York Times headquarters on 8th Avenue, the former Herald Tribune on 41st Street, and numerous magazine publishers in the area around Times Square.
While the media industry has contracted dramatically, Midtown remains home to major outlets including The New York Times, Condé Nast, and numerous digital newsrooms. The area's density of media offices makes it the de facto capital of American journalism.
Washington Avenue, Crown Heights — A space of growth and longing
The Brooklyn Botanical Garden, adjacent to Prospect Park, evokes the novel's meditation on motherhood and cultivation — what it means to tend something fragile, to make beauty out of careful attention. For two women who grew up motherless, the idea of nurturing a daughter is both thrilling and terrifying. Spaces like this one, lush and purposefully tended, mirror the effort Val and Milly pour into their friendship and their new roles as mothers, even as they wonder whether they have the tools for the job.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was founded in 1910 on land reclaimed from an ash dump. Its Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, designed in 1915, is one of the oldest Japanese-style gardens in the United States. The garden has been a public treasure for over a century.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden spans 52 acres and houses over 14,000 plant species. Its famous Cherry Esplanade draws enormous crowds during spring bloom, and the garden offers year-round programming for adults, children, and families. Admission is charged but free on certain mornings.
Visit: Brooklyn Botanic Garden (park)
Cours Saleya or L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue — Where Helene taught them abundance
Among the scenes that linger in Val and Milly's memories of Helene is almost certainly the experience of being taken to a Provençal market — the kind of overflowing abundance that neither woman had known growing up. Helene showing them how to choose lavender honey, ripe tomatoes, a length of toile — this is the education in pleasure and independent womanhood that marked them both. It is also, perhaps, where the differences in how each woman absorbed Helene's lessons began to reveal themselves.
L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse is home to one of France's most famous antique and artisan markets, held every Sunday since the 1960s. The town, built on islands in the Sorgue River, has been a center of Provençal craft and commerce for centuries.
L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue's Sunday market draws antique hunters, food lovers, and tourists from across Europe. Hundreds of dealers set up along the riverbanks, selling everything from vintage linens to olive oil to hand-painted ceramics. The town is easily reachable from Aix-en-Provence or Avignon.
Visit: Marché de L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (landmark)
Brooklyn Bridge Park, DUMBO — The view between two worlds
The Manhattan skyline visible from Brooklyn's waterfront speaks to the novel's persistent themes of proximity and distance — how close Val and Milly are geographically and how far apart they sometimes feel emotionally. DUMBO, where Brooklyn's creative class gathers beneath the bridges, is the kind of place Milly has made her world and Val observes with admiration shaded by unease. The view across the water mirrors the view across class: everything gleaming and seemingly within reach, but always separated by something you cannot simply swim across.
DUMBO — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — was an industrial warehouse district through the mid-20th century. Artists moved in during the 1970s and 80s seeking cheap space, and by the 2000s it had become one of Brooklyn's most desirable and expensive neighborhoods.
Brooklyn Bridge Park, which runs along the waterfront through DUMBO, is one of New York City's most celebrated public spaces, featuring piers with sports facilities, lawns, playgrounds, and stunning views of the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge. Jane's Carousel, a restored 1922 merry-go-round, is a beloved landmark within the park.
Visit: Brooklyn Bridge Park (park)
More by Naima Coster: All Naima Coster books
Other nearby maps: The Truth About the Savolta Case by Eduardo Mendoza locations map