: Re: Is it practical to write a novel with two viewpoints and written from different points in time? I have an idea for a novel that is told from two, first person viewpoints. One of these viewpoints

@LarsenBagley300

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Holes by Louis Sachar starts in media res of one of three stories, essentially telling three stories over four seperate time periods. The main character, Stanley Yelnats IV, is in the contemporary setting and view point for this story (his time at at a juvinile corrections facility Camp Green Lake in the middle of the Texas Desert (the lake had long since dried up), and the story leading up to the in media res start of the novel where he's introduced (Time Lines 1 and 2, Storyline 1) where he was falsley convicted of theft and sentenced to the camp and which he blames on the Yelnats Family Curse, a family legend about their generational misfortunes.

His Great-Great Grandfather (Stanley Yelnats, who fathers Stanley Yelnats I) is the viewpoint for the next storyline and is a story about his life in Eastern Europe in the Early 19 century, specifically how the curse was placed on his family after he ran away to America and inadvertently forgetting to repay a debt to Madame Zeroni, an old woman from Africa implied to have mystical powers (third Time Line, Second Story).

Later, the third storyline is about the Town or Green Lake (which does have a lake in this time line), which became Camp Green Lake in the contemporary story. The story focuses on the town's last days in 1888, with school teacher Katherine Barlow as the viewpoint character and the development of mutual romantic feelings with Sam, a black man who sold onions and repaired the school house for Katherine. The pair are caught kissing and the town's outrage leads to Sam's death and Kate's rage induce response occurs on the last day rain was recorded in the town, implying that the century plus drought was divine retribution on the towns people.

The four stories are mostly self contained but interconnected subtlely (for example, the only tow people of African decent in the stories not told by Stanley IV are implied to be related, as the mystic woman says her son had already immigrated to America at the start of the first story and Sam's last name is not mentioned. Along with some idiosyncratic characteristics, such as reciting lines from the same folk poem, it's implied that the two are related in some way. This is hardly the only connection, as Stanley is also revealed to have a family member who met Katherine in a chance encounter and there are more important connections between the four different time lines that occur over the course of the novel).

The 90s novel series Animorphs would frequently rotate first person narrators, with 4 out of 6 main characters getting two books in a rotation of 10 books to narrate and the remaining two getting one book each (until they were promoted to 2 books each in a 12 book rotation). Additionally, a few books would have a main character act as a second narrator (for parts that the main narrator couldn't reliably narrate) and 4 ancillary books (The Megamorphs) were each told jointly by the six main characters' narrations, though the distribution was as needed and an addition 5 books (The 4 "Chronicles" line and the singlular "Visser") were told entirely by secondary characters, with only Visser and the last Chronicle line being singular narrators).

While not a novel per se, Kamen Rider: Kiva was the 2008 entry in the Japanese series Kamen Rider (think Power Rangers in style) and featured a story based around the adventures of Kiva in 2008 and his alter ego's Father in 1988 that the audience learned about concurrently over the course of the series. This was framed in universe as Kiva uncovering the historical events of his fathers adventures and the influence those events had on the present events.

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