Point of View

Emmy Lake narrates the novel from a first-person perspective. Emmy speaks from an advantaged position of knowing the outcome of the story while revealing it in past tense and chronologically to the reader. The novel is thus straightforward in its approach to narrative and time. Because Emmy tells her own story, we must always be suspicious of her reliability as a narrator. Naturally, she is given to putting herself in the best light, even when describing her faults. There are only brief glimpses of times when we are able to doubt the truth of what she says, notably when Bunty tells Emmy that her advice to Kitty was bad. When Emmy spoke about Kitty earlier in the novel, she did not say anything about giving her unhelpful advice. We can question some of the more subtle elements of the narration by looking at Emmy’s...