Point of View

In The Deal by Elle Kennedy, the dual first-person narrative structure — alternating between Hannah's and Garrett's perspectives chapter by chapter — is one of the novel's most important and carefully deployed formal choices, shaping not just how the story is told but what the story is fundamentally about. By giving both protagonists equal narrative real estate and equal interiority, Kennedy makes a thematic argument from the very first pages: that this is not a story about one person's healing observed from the outside, but about two people's simultaneous and intertwining journeys toward wholeness, each of which is as complex and deserving of attention as the other.

The dual perspective is particularly significant given the nature of Hannah's backstory. A lesser novel might have told Hannah's story entirely from the outside, filtering her trauma through another character's perception and risking the reduction of her experience to something...