Point of View

The majority of the novel is told in the first person, past tense, from the perspective of Plum, with the exception of the interludes recounting the news stories surrounding the Jennifer terrorist attacks which are told in the third person, past tense, with an omniscient narrator. At times, this division of the point of view leads to a disjointed feeling in which the news stories never feel fully integrated with the main body of the narrative: rather than the revelations about the origins and developments of the Jennifer group being integrated into the main narrative, they are delivered in entirely separate segments that do not feature Plum or any of the other characters that the reader knows. As a result of this, the attacks never seem to have any serious impact on the lives of the characters in the main narrative of the novel despite...