Point of View

Sweet Sorrow is told from the first person point of view of 16-year-old Charlie Lewis, a mediocre teenager living in a nondescript English town. Charlie describes himself as the “vaguely familiar face in the middle row, someone with no anecdotes or associations, no scandals or triumphs, to their name” (6). The narration primarily focuses on Charlie just out of his final year of high school, but plenty of glimpses to both past and future Charlie are scattered throughout the work. The novel is not linear, but chapters segue smoothly one onto the next.

The reader hops along for a journey of self-discovery in the mind of a troubled teenage boy crippled with self-doubt and familial issues. Charlie often dwells on the past, mostly because the most troublesome events of his life are only a few months behind him. He is still reeling from his mother’s...