Point of View

The prologue of the novel announces, in first-person narration, that Shahrazad will now tell her own story rather than someone else's. Yet the rest of the novel is then narrated from a third person omniscient perspective. Readers may wonder about this shift in perspective, but it is perhaps simply a means of tying the story to its roots in oral storytelling: traditionally such narrations were about someone else, a character in a fable or morality lesson, and were told in the third person.

Telling the story as an old woman means the novel is written in the past tense. This adds to the gravity of the story as being weighted in the distant past. Additonally, Shahrazad has all the benefit of hindsight, knowing the end of the story and its aftermath before she begins to tell it, and being able to craft the narrative arc accordingly...