Willa is the first-person narrator for a significant part of the novel. While other sections of the text follow the points of view of Jottie and Layla, Willa is the only character to speak in her own voice. Her growing self-awareness and sense of identity—her developing first-person voice—as she passes from childhood into adolescence is a central theme of the novel.

Willa is at once drawn to and daunted by the elusive, forbidden “knowledge” that she associates with the adult world. She identifies herself as a “sneak,” someone who is good at gathering intelligence while remaining unobserved and has mixed feelings about her abilities. While she is initially fascinated by the independent, cosmopolitan Layla, Willa turns against her when she feels obliged to choose between Layla and her father. She is more comfortable reducing Layla to a misogynistic stereotype and blaming her for everything than toppling the ideal that she has set up of her father, the distant and enigmatic Felix.

When Willa feels forced to choose between Felix and Jottie—the aunt who has been her surrogate mother—she realizes that she owes everything to Jottie and must necessarily forsake the patriarchal authority figure who has presided over her life and her world vision thus far.