Point of View

The novel is told in the present tense through the first-person point of view of Tracy. The present tense gives the novel an immediacy which highlights the importance of time to Tracy, who is literally counting down the days until her father’s execution.

Tracy is a sixteen-year-old girl, and her whole world revolves around herself, her family, and her love-interests. Like many young adult novels, the depth and breadth of the story is determined by the scope of Tracy’s concerns. However, because she has grown up Black in America and witnessed the horrors of racism that exists within the corrupt criminal justice system that has sentenced her father to death for a crime he did not commit and then accused her brother of a crime he did not commit either, the scope of Tracy’s concerns are more political and less narcissistic, though...