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So, I'm writing a book. Here are the first three paragraphs. What do you think?

The only beautiful thing about my childhood home was Beulah, a centuries-old duchess of an oak whose trunk sprawled across our lawn. She was a kind dowager, allowing the three of us to climb into her arms and hide from the world in the folds of her leafy gown. Being the only girl, I suppose I was the only one of the Davenport children that Beulah entrusted with the secrets of her name and station. I was the quiet one, the only one who sat still long enough to hear everything she whispered in the breezes. I lay in the cradle of her branches for whole summers, spent autumns swinging my legs high above the ground. Brendan and Blaine wouldn’t have heard her had she tried to confide in them; their boyish voices had no volume but loud and no speed but rapid and constant. To my brothers, the identical twins of us three triplets, Beulah was simply the easiest place to hide from the ever-watchful eye of our mother. To me, she was the guardian of my dreams, the comforting collector of my tears, the soother of hurts, and the confidante that faithfully listened as I pondered, sifted, and wrestled through every problem that shattered the earth beneath my tentative awkward feet.

Someone set fire to Beulah once; I’ve suspected my whole life that it was Father. She didn’t burn to the ground, but there were scars to be sure -- a charred brittleness to the side of her trunk that faced the house, and I had watched paralyzed as one of her branches had splintered, her leaves glowing like molten gold as it crashed to the ground with a deafening crack. The fire department had appeared at our house as if by magic and the fire was doused within minutes of their arrival. Even tired and shrunken as the fire had left her, Beulah still towered proudly over me as I stood in front of her for the first time in sixteen years. Her leaves waved to me gracefully in the breeze, welcoming me back to a place I had promised myself when I left for college that I would never see again. Had Brendan not called with the news of Father’s death, I would have kept that promise. I longed to climb up and hide now; shut out the world, to again be the little girl that could create worlds and kingdoms to block out the grayness of her life. I couldn’t keep putting off meeting my family after so long. I turned from my old friend and leaned against her trunk, forcing my eyes to settle on the house where he’d been discovered.

The house hadn’t changed. The boards that had once been white were now mostly bare with large splotches of peeled paint. The post that Father had kicked in on my fifteenth birthday was still broken in half and rotting along with the rest of the house. The windows were filthy. I crossed the dusty lawn with its sparse patches of grass and climbed the stairs. As the door opened, sticking on its hinges just as it had when I left, I was assaulted by smells both familiar and strange. Stale tobacco smoke. Spilled scotch. The litter box that likely hadn’t been cleaned in a month. The sickeningly sweet smell of too much gardenia scented potpourri that Mommy had used desperately to cover up the other odors. Things were tidy, though, and several cleaning supplies sat on the kitchen counter as though they had just been pulled out for their yearly use in the spring.