Point of View

The majority of this story is told from the point of view of a third person narrator. Each chapter, for the most part, follows one character and narrates the events through that character’s perspective. For instance, in Chapter 32, North focuses on Jake’s perspective of the meeting between his father, and Pete, the man whom Jake believes is just a police officer. Jake compares his father’s behavior to what he knows, which is school: “He’d been fine with the other police people, but he looked pale and scared now, as though this were a classroom for him and the new policeman was someone like Mrs. Shelley” (170).

Tom’s sections of the novel are told from the first-person point of view. North seems to use this different point of view to differentiate Tom’s present-day story from the stories of the other characters...