Summary

In the first pages, the book refers to a quote from the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. The quote is about moments in time and memories. The quote's speaker asks to be remembered. The novel itself begins in the present tense with the recorded voice of Esteban. "We think they took my papi" (1). The narrator, twelve-year-old Haley, is sitting in her bedroom at the end of summer listening to the recording she and her five friends made during the course of the previous school year as they sat in a circle in a place they dubbed the ARTT room. Esteban's voice goes on, "Nobody knows where he's at" (2). Haley mentions that a blue jay is sitting outside her window in an Ailanthus tree or Tree of Heaven. The same kind of tree is in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn...