Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

So, I’m reading this. I’m reading it because when my mother visited me in New York we passed by a tree of heaven and my mother mentioned a Tree Grows in Brooklyn and how it had been my grandad’s favourite film. And I don’t remember an awful lot about my grandad because he died when I was very young so it was nice too know something else about him.

By chance, after my mother left for home, I was striking around a jumble sale in greenpoint and I noticed this book. I paid twice what that the lady asked for it – I mean she only asked for 50c but i’m telling you to add colour. I thought it was brilliant luck.

I planned to send it to my mother but I couldn’t bear to send it without knowing what it was that made this story so special to someone from my family.

So I picked it up and started to read it. It’s so old that the pages crumble in the breeze of air that precedes a train on the subway or when my fingers fumble over pages desperate to read the next page. I’ll be sending it to my mother with the cover torn off and the first page taped on.

It’s a briliant book. It’s set in Williamsburg near where i’m living now. It’s about immigration, class, family, poverty. It’s told through the eyes of a young girl as she moves through childhood into the adult world. There’s the hungry love of christmas that I inherited from my own father. There’s the books put in my hands when they weren’t big enough to hold them. Ok it was paddington bear not shakespeare but whatever.

I haven’t finished it yet. I’m worried that it will crumble into dust before I finish it. Or perhaps even after my mother has finished it. Someone with more of a dreamers heart might connect that to some sort of ethereal connection between memories death and reality i’m putting it down to the nature of paper and time. Something google + may know nothing about.