Hill uses a number of literary techniques in the novel: foreshadowing, flashback, similes, and dialect to add flavor to this story. Telling the story through the voice of the main character, Margaret Reeves O'Neill, enriches the reader's enjoyment of the novel.

Hill incorporated similes to aid readers in visualizing characters and their emotions and actions. For instance when Mr. Phelps informs the slaves that Gaylan's will does not free them until the war's end, "Their faces were as blank as pages in an empty ledger." More examples are when Mrs. Campbell declares that "Tiger-Eye Brown is a scourge sent from the Devil himself," when one of Mrs. Brown's news articles describes the O'Neill women as "self-satisfied slave-holding women, with the trappings of culture and the sensibilities of scullery maids," and when Mrs. Brown says, "the workings of this family are a tangled web they have woven...