Point of View

The book’s narrative point of view shifts constantly, and in several different ways. First, chapters are voiced from the first-person perspectives of a variety of characters, with there being no regular pattern to the shifts between those characters. Primary narrators are protagonist Orion Oh; Orion’s ex-wife Annie; their son Andrew; and Annie’s cousin Kevin, the man who abused her as a child. There are also several points at which single chapters focus on the first-person voices of characters like Ariane and Marissa (Annie and Orion’s daughters) and Ruth Fletcher, a long-time resident of Three Rivers, the town where Annie grew up and in which she and Orion raised their family. Then, within each chapter, there are shifts between past-tense and present-tense, although it is important to note that shifts between tense do not always correspond with shifts in time. In other...