Point of View

The novel is a coming-of-age story told from the limited perspective of a nine-year-old child. The challenge in allowing a child to tell the story is to avoid sentimentalizing that perspective by condescending to the obvious, that a child knows less than they think, that their judgments are inevitably impacted by their lack of awareness. A child is sweet and innocent, and their limited perspective, with its understandable confusion, is in the end endearing.

The novel cannot afford such luxury. Jai needs to grow up and grow up soon. Using a child to narrate allows for irony in two critical areas, in Jai’s depiction of day-to-day life below the poverty line and in his police procedural-driven account of his investigation into the missing children. Jai is not equipped to respond adequately to either condition, and the reader is locked within the claustrophobic limits of...