In Elizabeth McNair, the viewpoint character and narrator of the story, Wilhelm created an unreliable narrator, one whose incomplete observations, while interesting, require the reader to constantly evaluate events and their meaning. Liz is a firstperson narrator, speaking to William Radix, her intended reader, as if she were telling the story in person. Liz tells the story from two perspectives: one is as she experiences it and the other is as a nineteen year old, the time at which she finally writes down the tale.

Wilhelm has very carefully plotted the story, using establishment chapters in the beginning to introduce the family, and especially Liz's mother and father and their history in chapters two and three, and then creating stages in the children's attempts to cope with their orphaned lives. For example, although Leeann's ideas about the outside world dominate the children's thinking and their subsequent...