Point of View

The point of view of the novel is told through a first-person past with Hollis Brite as the narrator and main character. Because she is the narrator and main character, everything we have access to in the world is filtered through her gaze. Hollis is young and admittedly uneducated about her world, and so the glimpse we get of court live and international politics is a surface level glimpse. Hollis is more concerned with clothes and jokes and dancing than she is with the border issues between Coroa and Isolte. The novel is more focused on Hollis’s emotions and her conflicting feelings for Jameson and Silas than it is focused on the political intrigue hovering at the fringe of Hollis’s gaze.

Hollis is an exceptionally naïve young teenage girl. She grew up in the country and only recently moved to court to...