Not really a typo but a switch from “his roost in the golden beech tree” to “Sammy’s autumn-gilded birch” that comes about a page later.
Diamant has placed eleven year-old Sammy Stanley up in a tree, fingering five dimes in his pocket. This leads into how Sammy has accumulated about a seventy-eight dollar stash, gained mainly from stealing from his mother’s whorehouse clients as they sleep.
The opening line of this chapter (after we’ve resolved Black Ruth’s history) is rife with sound:
Sammy Stanley perched on the branch of a beech tree and stared at the sea.” (p. 87)
Which is why the beech tree sticks in the reader’s mind and is jarred when the offending birch tree is mentioned incorrectly later on. It also likely shows that Diamant may have either a knack for alliteration (some folks do or are trained for it, even in speech) or had particularly planned this sentence whilst tossing about the idea of birch versus beech. Then she may have forgotten which choice she’d made and without being a misspelling, it wasn’t easily caught.
I like alliteration. I tend to overdo on it myself sometimes, but I like the way it makes sentences sing. Sonorously. Seriously.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology