Whistle Me Home employs an omniscient, present tense narrative voice, providing an edgy, yet casual tone to a novel that deals with intense emotions and issues. The incident in which Noli and TJ watch an elderly woman visit a grave on Christmas morning is described as "like a scene from a movie"— and this is a good description of the novel's narrative flow. The reader is not always privy to all the events in Noli's life; the style is more cinematic, with attention focused on brief moments in time—mostly those times that Noli and TJ interact—before quickly moving on to the next scene.

This approach goes hand-in-hand with another literary technique used throughout the novel: understatement. Early in the book the reader is told, "Noli had a little problem with alcohol" which downplays the severity of her condition. Other topics, including...