Point of View

The story is told from the first-person perspective of narrator and protagonist Tish. This means that the focus is on her experiences, feelings, and insights, with those of the other characters being filtered through her perspectives. That said, there are several occasions throughout the book where there is narrative of scenes or events for which she is not present – for example, conversations between her father and Fonny’s father, or the story of Sharon’s trip to Puerto Rico. In some of these situations, particularly the latter, there are references to Tish having been told the story of what happened sometime after the fact; in others, there are no such references. The implication is that she has been told of these events, but there is occasionally the sense that she knows more about the inner lives and experiences of the characters than would seem to...