Point of View

The novel is, for the most part, narrated in the first-person perspective by 16-year-old Sarah as she tries to remember and recover the events that happened during a family trip in Mexico when she was ten. She is in the middle of what she considers an existential crisis, where she no longer knows who she is or what she wants to do with herself, so her narrative is often disjointed as she jumps from topic to topic, repeating stories, phrases, and ideas. One phrase she repeats throughout the narrative is "nothing ever really happens," a statement that she both believes and a warning to readers (1). Much of what she narrates about her past and even her present at the beginning of the book turns out to be a fictionalized or imagined version of what actually happened. For example, early on in the narrative she recalls...