Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First-Person (Central Narrator)
This book makes it very clear from the first lines that we're dealing with a first person narrator who will be at the center of the story we're about to read. The first line of the book reads, "I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm" (Prologue.1). From this point on, we follow Dana as she tells us the story of how she suddenly travelled back in time to 1815 Maryland to meet her ancestor Rufus, a white boy whose father runs a plantation with slaves. Our only access to characters' thoughts and actions are filtered through Dana's mind and her perceptions of the outside world. She's also our central point of sympathy. The fact that she's a good person makes it a lot easier to like her, too.