Point of View

The story is told in the first person, mostly from the perspective of the present-day Julia Robinson. She looks back at the events of two years ago that drove her and Cassie apart, and tells her story from her new vantage point as an incoming high school senior. By using a 17-year-old narrator to tell the story of 12-15-year-old girls, Claire Messud is able to tell a child's story from a teenager's perspective. There are aspects of Julia and Cassie's story that Julia could not have fully grasped at the time, because she was too young to put words to them yet. When Cassie and Julia see the Kirschbaums swimming in the quarry, they know that Cassie would not look as if she belonged there. It was "one of those things we were too young to know we knew, but we knew it just...