Isaacs uses first-person narration throughout the novel. This intensifies the horror and anxiety of Linda's experiences in wartime Berlin; the reader feels the dislocation and fear almost as immediately as the narrator does.

Like Isaacs's previous novels, Shining Through exuberantly mixes story-lines and formulas. It borrows "action" and suspense elements from the espionage novel, but its protagonist is an amateur, and is both more ethical and less prone to heroics than such culture-idol spies as James Bond.

As a historical novel it aims to place its characters in a plausible setting and situation, rather than to show them as participants in "Great Events." The Normandy invasion is the only actual military operation referred to, and its impact in the story is offstage and indirect.

As a love story, Shining Through rather resembles the modern Gothic romance in keeping both reader and heroine guessing about which man in her...