'It was simple for me, the saints were in heaven and guardian angels had extendable wings like batman and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the back yard.'
When ten-year-old Simone's father dies, her mother Dawn is left to raise her and her brothers on her own. Grief suffuses the house, seeming to penetrate even the walls. As their mother succumbs to sorrow the children are left floundering with their own unhappiness and loss. But Simone hears her father calling to her from the Poinciana tree outside her window, and climbs the tree to listen. When she persuades her mother to climb up and listen too, the family slowly begins to heal itself.
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[It was simple for me: the saints were in heaven, and guardian angels had extendable wings like Batman, and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the back yard]***
(Penguin Books, 26 June 2003, first published 27 June 2002, 176 pages, paperback, borrowed from @GlasgowLib)
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I thought this was an incredibly sad and moving novella about loss, death and grief. Simone's conviction that her dead father lives in the highest branches of the tree in their back yard is almost heart-breaking. She cannot bear to not have him in her life. I was stuck by the fact grief seems to pull the family apart as Simone's mother starts to pull further and further away. Simone's innocent belief that she can speak to her dead father if she climbs the tree both heals the family's pain and also prevents them from moving on and also blinds them to the fact the tree in unsound and on the brink of bringing the house down. The portrayal of grief is very real in this book. Simone's mother reminded me of how my mother was when her mother died. She had Alzheimer's disease for many years and her death shouldn't have been a shock but it was and it turned my mother into a sobbing, white-faced ghost. I liked the fact there is a lot of hope and love in the book as well.
