Point of View

The novel is primarily told from the first-person perspective of Xiomara Batista, the protagonist of the novel. Xiomara's point of view is colored by her identity as a girl growing up in an urban setting, as a daughter in a Catholic home, and as a person who struggles to claim her own voice.

The urban setting of the novel is reflected in the details Xiomara includes about the streets, trains, and locked-down inner-city school Xiomara attends. Xiomara's narration in these moments veers between her brief moments of freedom she feels in spaces like the smoke park and the train to moments in spaces like the school cafeteria where Xiomara deals with constraints she is under.

Those constraints are also readily apparent in the poems that include Xiomara's interior monologues as she sits in church, chafed by the anti-woman, somewhat Eurocentric messages Xiomara sees at work...