Ever, the novel’s protagonist, does not narrate his own story until the final chapter. This means that much of what readers learn about Ever and his life happens through narration provided by other characters. Each of the characters who serve as part-time narrators are part of Ever’s large, extended family, and the effect of this kind of polyvocal narration is that each character seems complete only within the context of their family. It is a metaphor for the importance of family in the narrative, writ large: To truly understand Ever, readers must also know and understand his family, and Ever fully emerges only as one piece of the larger whole that is the extended Geimausaddle clan.

The child of Turtle and Everardo, young Ever bears witness to his father’s brutal beating at the hands of border agents when he is too young to truly process the experience. Lena understands the damage that such traumatic events do to young, developing children, and she also understands that being raised by a parent with addiction (like her own husband Vincent and their daughter Turtle) is its own kind of trauma.