Alanna: The First Adventure Narrator:

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

Third Person (Limited Omniscient): Alanna

We see things through Alanna's eyes for most of the story, which is great because we empathize with her and feel her pain. Not literally, thank goodness, since she gets way more beatings that we're comfortable with. But limited perspective does give us good insight into where she's coming from, like how she's so driven to become a knight, and why she's so afraid of being found out as a girl.

For instance, we see Alanna's fear at being caught when she first visits the palace tailors: 

Realizing they would measure her for her page's uniform, Alanna felt sick. Her mind whirled with visions of being forced to strip, of being caught and sent home in disgrace before she had even had a chance to start. (2.17)

Sounds icky—and if you don't feel a little queasy reading that, then you might want to increase your diet of literary fiction to build up your empathy.

The point of view stays in the third person, though, meaning that we get "he" and "she" descriptions, never "I" or "you." Most of the time, we're hovering inside Alanna's viewpoint, though there are occasional exceptions. We see Sir Myles sitting alone and thinking about some quirk of "Alan's" as though he's on the brink of figuring out Alanna's secret. We see Jonathan and the other pages talking about what to do about Ralon since he's beating on Alanna. But these snippets don't occur very often, and, when they do, Alanna remains central to the action: other characters are talking or thinking about her, shoring up her position as the main character of the story.