Point of View

The novel is written from a third-person perspective, a technique that allows the author to tell the story of both Tycho and Angela, who essentially inhabit different worlds. The point of view employed also allows a tenderness and empathy for the plight of the characters to bleed through the prose; the author appears to have been writing about some aspect - or a composite of aspects - of her own childhood.

By employing a third-person perspective, the author is also able to oscillate easily between the contrasting worlds in which Tycho and Angela live. More than just simply allowing the author to be a "fly on the wall" in both the Potter and May households, however, the third-person point of view allows the author to create a distance between the authorial voice and the events and emotions that unfold in the story. Because Tycho and Angela...