What I found intriguing was the combination of not just 3 shifting point of views, but also interwoven, like three strands braided together, the different time frames within each person's point of view.
It was a dynamic of 3 people's memories, both very far in the past and the more recent past, interacting and mirroring each other within the present time.
Although Iris is the most firmly established in the present, there were shifts to her childhood when she first meets Alex. Yet, we see glimpses of her as "the little girl" in Kitty's memories, like shifting images in refracted halls of mirrors.
Esme is situated in the larger time frame... in the very distant past, in India, and the trauma of her little brother's death. Then we toggle back and forth -- her time in Edinburgh with her grandparents, her teenage years at school, the Jamie episodes, her incarceration, the birth of her Robert, and the present period when she meets Iris in the contemporary present.
Kitty is a rollercoaster ride of memory snippets ... the Alzheimer's staccato, machine-gun effect of her memories is well done. It was frustrating at times when I lost sense of the chronology, or the plot sequences, but eventually, like a clever jigsaw puzzle, the pieces fell into place.
This was a very dynamic, hyper-kinetic style of writing. Almost cinematic in its presentation. Very well done.
IBIS
"I am a part of everything that I have read."
