Point of View

Ellen Marie Wiseman tells her novel “The Plum Tree” from the third-person limited-omniscient point of view. The third-person narrative mode allows the reader to follow along in Christine’s story as she moves from a girl of seventeen to a young woman of twenty-four, skipping days and sometimes months at a time in order to progress the story. This also allows the author to insert important historical contextual information, especially when it comes to the Nazis. The limited-omniscient aspect of the narration lends both drama and suspense to the story and underscores the reality of not truly knowing much during war. For Christine, she is completely unaware of whether her father has died fighting at the front or whether Isaac has died at Dachau. This also lends an air of believability and realism to the novel, demonstrating that no person can truly know everything going...