Point of View

The novel is written from the first and third-person points of view. The sections “The Lost Notebooks of Giselle Chin” and “Jackie Ong at the End of the World” are both written from the third-person point of view, while “Always Something There to Remind Me” is written from the first-person point of view. In the first two sections, the third- person narrator is limited to Giselle’s and Jackie’s respective points of view. In “The Lost Notebooks of Giselle Chin,” the narrator describes the narrative world according to Giselle’s perception of it, filtering her experiences through Giselle’s intimate lens. For example, when the girls meet at the neighbors’ barbecue, the narrator says that “To acknowledge that it was a situation would break the spell, but they all knew, and knew the others knew, that it was, indeed, a situation. A kind of...