Point of View

The novel’s point of view builds intimacy by refusing a single, stable authority and instead staging a conversation between lived experience and the stories people tell about that experience. Much of the book follows the three sisters in a close third person that stays near their immediate perceptions, letting the reader feel how Ina’s vigilance, Evelyn’s defensiveness, and Anastasia’s restlessness shape what they notice and what they avoid. That closeness is repeatedly interrupted by a first-person narrator who knows the sisters from childhood and later returns to them as a writer, a choice that makes the reader constantly aware that access can be partial, mediated, and self-interested.

This alternation shapes character by showing that each sister is both a private person and a public figure in someone else’s account. In third-person scenes, Ina’s need to manage risk reads as...