Point of View

The stories in the collection are all written from the first-person perspective. This provides the reader with unlimited access to the narrator's conscious, their interior thoughts and how they reflect on events transpiring around them.

Despite the breadth of thoughts on hand for the reader, the first-person narrative point of view is also limited in that it is constricted to the thoughts of just one character, such as Charlie in "Brother in Another Language," where Charlie's hatred for his father is explained but the father's perspective is absent. The reader is only able to see other characters and their actions through the moral and social perspective of a single character.

Along with the first-person, all the stories are written in the past simple tense. Combined, this provides for a more reflective narration since time has passed from when the events of the story occurred. The...