Point of View

The novel is told from the first-person point of view of Cedar Songmaker, who is recording the events of the apocalypse in a journal for her unborn child. The journal is a confessional format, and thus allows for Cedar to explore her thoughts and feelings in detail. Cedar's narration is fully of dark comedy and brutal honesty, without a hint of self-consciousness. She tells the reader, for example, that she enjoyed being the only Native American girl in grade school because she felt special, and that when she went to college and met other Native Americans, she dropped out. “I'd been a snowflake,” she admits, “Without my specialness, I melted” (5). She humorously recounts her romanticized childhood fantasies about the possible fates of her biological parents, “who died in some vague and suitably spiritual Native way—perhaps fasting themselves to death or sundancing to heatstroke or...