Brooklyn Bridge (review)

Joseph Michtom used to be just one of the guys in his neighborhood of Jewish immigrants, and he liked it that way. When his parents hit on the idea of sewing and selling stuffed bears inspired by President Roosevelt and his defense of wildlife, however, the family fortunes turned for the better and Joseph’s social life for the worse. Now there’s more money but also less parental attention, more chores, and little chance that he’ll pry his parents away from the shop to take him on an excursion to Coney Island. Narrator Joseph regales readers with stories of his increasingly successful extended family, and Hesse interjects stories of quite another sort—brief tales of homeless children who live in the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge and are haunted by a ghostly boy whom they regard as a harbinger of death. Joseph’s stories, witty and concrete, sit oddly alongside Hesse’s gloomy italicized portraits, and readers may wonder whether the tales are meant as social contrast or whether they will eventually converge. Converge they do, in a chapterful of climactic revelation that reunites a long-lost uncle with a supposedly widowed aunt and yanks a family skeleton out of the closet (well, actually from under the bridge) in a torrent of melodrama. Each narrative track has its appeal, but probably not for the same audience: kids who come for the historical fiction (loosely inspired by the actual inventors of the teddy bear) may find the ghost story a silly distraction, while the ghost-story set may become impatient with details of stickball games, home-based branch libraries, and battling aunties. Still, it’s a quick read with considerable book-report potential, and fans of Hesse will simply be interested to follow her foray into a different fictional style. Reviewed from an unillustrated galley.