Point of View

The point of view of The House of Broken Angels is multiple and diverse, as the story is narrated from the perspective of practically every member of the de la Cruz family: Big Angel, Little Angel, Perla, Minnie, Lalo, César, Marco, La Gloriosa, Lupita, and Yndio, amonst others. While the novel seeks to work through the meaning of a family “patriarch,” the novel’s own storytelling perspective resists the control and authority that the word “patriarch” implies. In other words, each character in this novel shares the burden of telling the story of the de la Cruz family so that the multiplicity of these perspectives mimics the novel’s main thesis about family. Family is like a communal story written over generations, without any one person controlling the story.

The different, and at times competing, perspectives also allows the reader to see how particular...