Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?
[First-Person (Central Narrator)/ Lily Owens]
Lily Owens is our own personal tour guide through the fictional South Carolina towns of Sylvan and Tiburon. Her narration rides the border between adult insight and teen angst, which you can see in her very first words to the reader:
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam. (1.1)
The imagery is exquisite, but there's also an angsty earnestness in it that seems really youthful. Avril Lavigne would be proud.
Lily is a thoroughly honest and faithful narrator, even reporting things about herself that she doesn't like. For example, when she realizes that she herself has held some prejudiced views about African Americans, she cops to it:
Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That's what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me. (4.103)
Her insistence upon drawing attention to her relationship to the events she describes and expressing even her less admirable thoughts and qualities lends her a ton of reliability as a narrator.