Point of View

The novel has two narrators: Lowen and Verity. When Lowen is the narrator, she narrates in the first person and the present tense. Lowen is mostly portrayed as an everyday, relatable character, allowing the reader to imagine themselves in Lowen’s position as she struggles with increasingly disturbing ideas and challenges. Ultimately, when Lowen decides to enable Verity’s murder, and then destroy the letter from Verity, the reader is compelled to ask themselves if they would have done the same thing in Lowen’s position, or something different. Lowen’s perspective is shaped and complicated by a number of factors, such as her finding of Verity’s memoir (and later the letter), her increasing attraction to Jeremy, her increasing suspicion of Verity, and more.

When Verity is the narrator, her narration is contained within her secret memoir, and then within the letter that Lowen...