Point of View

The novel is narrated in the third-person, always from the perspective of Winona, a young orphan of the Lakota Indian tribe who lives with her adoptive parents John Cole and Thomas McNulty in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. She is consumed by loneliness as she attempts to navigate the combination of being separated from her mother so young and living as one of very few ethnic minorities in her mostly white town in the wake of the Civil War. Sebastian Barry does not place any limitations on the access to Winona’s inner thoughts, allowing the reader to understand her true motivations, fears, and conflicts. In her childlike manner, Winona is always completely honest with the people in her life that she feels as though she can trust, but she does not always speak her mind because she is conscious of...