Point of View

The novel is narrated from the first-person point of view of 17-year-old Lucy Adler in the present tense. Lucy is a senior at a private high school in Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1993-4 when the novel takes place. The author provides a realistic window into the psyche of an adolescent girl on the cusp of womanhood as she determines her place in the world and what kind of person she wants to be.

The first person narration allows the reader access into Lucy's interior life, ruled as it is by boys and basketball, observations about the city she lives in, but also deep existential thought. Sometimes these different aspects of Lucy's personality are shown to intersect in interesting ways. For example, she connects her feelings about her sport, New York City, and her own sensibility while wandering the Lower East Side: “That's why basketball...