Point of View

The novel is written in first person from the perspective of Elizabeth Boylston. She is a wife, midwife, and mother, and close friend of Abigail Adams. The novel opens with Elizabeth preparing Abigail's body for burial in keeping with a promise she made Abigail years earlier, though she had argued at the time she would not live to do that task. The next chapter drops back more than four decades and the remainder of the novel is Elizabeth telling the story of how she and Abigail became such close friend and how they lived through the early years of America's fight for independence.

The perspective is limited to Elizabeth, which is how the author creates tension and provides plot twists at the end of the novel. A major point of this limitation is that Elizabeth is under the impression that Martha and her brother, Thomas...