Clearly nonlinear, we go back in time rather than forward with each chapter, marked with dates (years) covered. Junot Diaz jumps from time periods with focus on a different character in each chapter, from Oscar, to his sister Lola, and now to their mother, Beli. What is interesting is that we find something new about the characters by the different perspectives, and in particular, where Lola's problems with her mother appeared to make her mother into a monster, where Diaz has left us in chapter two leads into an answer that surprises us. Here, at the end of Chapter 2, Lola is listening to her abuela talk of Lola's mother.
She was about to say something else and then she stopped. And that's when it hit with the force of a hurricane. The feeling. I stood, straight up, the way my mother always wanted me to stand up. My abuela was sitting there, forlorn, trying to cobble together the right words and I could not move or breathe. I felt like I always did at the last seconds of a race, when I was sure that I was going to explode. She was about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin. (p. 75)
After some description of Beli's life with her aunt–we find that she was an orphan, and her aunt was 'mother' to her–we begin to see a different image of Beli. But here is what we believe has disturbed Lola at the telling:
What is likely frightening to Lola as she hears her abeula's story, is that her restlessness, her spirit, her senses, are so very much like the mother she shuns.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology