Point of View

The story is written in third person from limited perspectives. The majority of the early part of the book is written from Selina's limited view of events but there are a few notable exceptions. Soon after Selina's marriage to Pervus DeJong, the reader gets a brief look at one of Pervus's private thoughts. He still looks at Selina as an elegant little thing, too small for the heavy country life and not really suited to it. He refers to her privately as an “exquisite toy, which, in a moment of madness, he had taken for himself.”

Roughly the second half of the book is written mainly from Dirk's perspective. Like Selina's perspective, the majority of this part of the book is limited in perspective but there are a few exceptions. A few passages are written more like an omniscient perspective. For example, Dirk knows that...