Cash Pruitt serves as the novel’s first-person narrator and main protagonist. Thus, his education becomes the reader’s education. At the age of 17, Cash Pruitt is a poet although he does not yet realize it, for he says, “I’m not afraid of a world filled with mystery” (4), and his willingness to engage with a world that can be as terrifying as it is beautiful drives the critical urgency of Cash’s coming-of-age narrative. He begins the novel as an emotionally timid teenager, retreating into self-doubt in part because of the difficult experiences growing up with an absent father and a mother who had an opioid addiction. His mother’s lifestyle—casual interest in Cash’s education, indifference to the responsibilities of running a house, noncommitment to a string of ill-chosen lovers—created in Cash a chronic sense of low self-esteem and a feeling of darkness, that the world can never open itself to wonder and enchantment. His childhood ends far too early. After finding his mother’s dead body in the bathroom and then spending two horrific hours watching over her corpse, Cash shuts down his interest in others.

His growth and development is guided by three critical agents: his closest friend Delaney Doyle, who teaches him to trust again and to allow his heart to reach out to another; his Papaw, who teaches him the value of looking at how the world operates; and his English professor, Dr.