Hesse has imbued her novel with many literary precedents and innovative techniques, which are among the most interesting qualities of the novel.

The most obvious are Hesse's use of sentence structure, line break, and chapter divisions. Readers will certainly ask why this book is considered a novel rather than a diary or poem, since it has all of the characteristics of the diary and poetic forms, and since reviewers have referred to it as all three. Its diarylike qualities include the following.

Each entry contains a date, and even though the day of the month is not specified, it is clear that each event chronologically follows the next. The headings for each entry are more like personal tags for remembering the entry than chapter titles that designate novelistic structure. Fourteen year olds normally do not write novels, while keeping a diary or journal was typical of...