Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Subjective
Forget about multiple points of view: My Name Is Asher Lev is basically Asher's diary, except instead of writing about who he's got a crush on and what he ate for lunch at school, he's writing about being a little Picasso who's also a pariah in his Hasidic congregation.
This novel's tone is subjective because it's told from a single point of view (Asher's), and therefore all the events that are described are filtered through Asher's lens: if he's upset/thrilled/annoyed about something, we definitely know about it. Because Asher is an artist, his point of view is particularly—how shall we say—artisitc:
I watched the mashpia put his hands on the desk, saw him still talking to me, and thought the street was crying and wondered how I could paint the street crying. I thought I had said something like that to myself before, but I could not remember when or where it might have been. The street is crying, I thought, and I'm sitting here. It's my street and I can't draw it. I want to paint it, I have to paint it while it's crying, and why am I sitting here? (131.1)
It takes a pretty unique mind to imagine a street crying, but then Asher's mind is about as unique as they come. It's passages like this that remind us how subjective the tone of this novel is. And passages like this one:
I remember drawing a building burning, a large marble building set in a green glade and surrounded by gentle hills. I drew it in pastels and made the marble of the building pale blue and veined with small wandering rivulets of white. There was a golden dome with a trim of purple arabesques; there were tall arched windows, somewhat like the windows of the Ladover building. I drew flames pouring from the windows and swirling around the roof and eating into the marble. My mother asked me what it was, and I said it was the library in Alexandria, the one the Moslems had ordered burned because its books could not be as important as the Koran. (121.1)
Asher draws this after his mom tells him about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, which contained a number of important Jewish texts. Asher's unique way of perceiving the world leads him to create this drawing, and to make it look like the Ladover building in his own neighborhood.
Asher's subjectivity sometimes gets in the way of his objectivity. Even though he's trying to clear his name and tell the story he believes is true, he's still doing it from a perspective—his own. And before we get all philosophical and start stroking our Socratic beards and wondering whether a subjective point of view can be capital-T True, we should keep in mind that every story is told from someone's point of view, which means the truth of the story is relative to its storyteller. Is your mind blown yet?