Point of View

A Fall of Marigolds is told from two different first person points of view. The first narrator is Taryn, a middle-aged woman living in Manhattan in 2011. The second narrator is Clara, a young woman living in New York City on Ellis Island in 1911. Clara's story takes up the bulk of the novel. Clara is experiencing trauma at the time of the novel. She is grieving the loss of someone she fell in love with, Edward Brim, in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The astute reader figures out pretty early on that Clara was carried away with her flirtation with this man to an irrational way. She loves him and feels he loved her even though they had only known each other a few weeks, and so her infatuation blinds her to what those around her could see: his flirtations were not to be taken too...