Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
First Person (Central)
Reese is a terrific narrator. He's smart and observant, so the other characters really come to life in his descriptions. But he's also totally hilarious, like in this description of Mr. Pugh:
Mr. Pugh had about four different faces. He had his normal face which was like maybe he was lost. He had a smiling face, which was like maybe he was lost but didn't care. He had his mad face, which looked like he wanted to kill you, and then he had this face that kind of darkened with his eyes darting around […]. (26.54)
Reese's descriptions are as good as a novelist's, which in a way he is: The author, Walter Dean Myers, has said that he writes for himself when he was a teenager.
Beyond all that, Reese is simply the right guy for the job. Since he's incarcerated for almost the entire novel, he doesn't really do that much. (Well, he goes to the eldercare facility, but there's not much going on there.) Being privy to Reese's thoughts is helpful for understanding his motivations when he gets into fights, plus, since the heart of the book is Reese's internal journey to figure out how to imbue his life with meaning, it would just be weird for someone else to be telling his story.