Point of View

The novel is narrated in first-person by an unnamed narrator in a mix of past and present tense. It reads much like a journal, in which the narrator is recounting events that have recently occurred in past tense, while occasionally writing about her observations as they occur to her in the present. The narrator seems to be a woman somewhere near middle-aged, as she notes at one point that her pregnancy was risky because of her age. The reader is given little information about her background; instead, the focus is entirely on her present-day life and feelings as she recovers from a miscarriage that happened sometime in the recent past. Thoughts of the baby she lost and the devastating reality that she will likely never be a mother haunt the narrator throughout her ordinary life—as she buys feed for the chickens, for instance, or...