Point of View

The novel is written from the first person point of view of the main character Kathleen Cheng. By writing the novel from Kathleen’s first person point of view, the author is centralizing the narrative conflict within Kathleen’s character’s interior world and thus her accruing tensions with her external circumstances. Having recently broken up with her longtime boyfriend Oren and just come back to her hometown in Oakland, California to live with her mother, Kathleen feels that “Heartbreak [is] its own kind of incandescence” in her revised reality away from Baltimore (1). Indeed, over the course of the weeks that follow, Kathleen’s experiences in Oakland with her mother, her mother’s fiancé, and her old friends increasingly complicate the way that she sees herself and understands her future. Although embedded within Kathleen’s psyche, these complications exist at the forefront of the narrative...