A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

This book was sitting on my shelf for quite a while, I ended up donating it only to buy another copy from Books-A-Million. Finally, I picked it up and fell in love with it. I didn't know if I was ready for a family drama, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed at the exact moment I picked it up. Francie Nolan has soared up on the list of my favorite fictional characters of all time; to be honest, you might not like the book as much if you are a "realist". However, if you are a dreamer and see the world much differently than your peers, you will love it!

I particularly liked her relationship with her mother. Yes, it was a co-dependent relationship with a lack of affection, but this made the moments where affection was shown show more between them that much more powerful. Francie sees so much and understands so much, and you watch her grow and understand the world, to accept and make the most of the life she has, to find the light in the darkest circumstances. Yeah, I love this book and highly recommend it, especially if it has been sitting on your shelf collecting dust for the last five years. show less

By the end of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith’s mostly autobiographical coming of age novel, sixteen year old Francie Nolan has packed more living into her young life than most 80 year old Americans. Smith’s turn of the century tale tells precocious Francie’s story as well as that of her mother, the grimly realistic Katie, alcoholic and dreamy-eyed father Johnny and brother Neeley as they endure their hardscrabble lives and manage to make it seem to those of us on the other side of the page, as though their love and respect for each other overcomes the dire poverty that surrounds them. Katie’s philosophy of life sums up very neatly all that she wants for her children:

”Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree show more growing up there out of the grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.” (Page 95)

And she toughens them up in every possible way; as if life wasn’t tough enough already. Katie’s imagination keeps her from succumbing from the depression that engulfs their lives as she scrubs the floors of one of several tenement buildings that she cleans daily:

”Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better.” (Page 199)

The book could only have been written by someone who had lived through the experience. The descriptions of life at this time, just before WWI, are too vivid to have not have been experienced by the author. She manages to convey an appreciation for the small things of life that are normally taken for granted. And she’s created in bright, gifted Francie, an unbelievably appealing child who endures all life throws at her and manages to come out on top. Highly recommended. show less

9/24/24 review
This book is a treasure. Readers love Francie because she's a reader, but that's just the start of why I love this book. It's full of life lessons, complex characters, heartbreak, and even some funny moments—it's a true American tale and one of the best coming-of-age novels out there. Also, I love any story that shows how hard work and education can change a girl's life and open up a world of possibilities. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this book again. Hopefully it doesn't take me 12 years next time.

9/4/2012 review, 5 stars
Readers often turn to gilded fairytale books to escape reality and to, most importantly, find hope. This book proves that hope can also be found in real, honest life.

Since this is a classic, I honestly expected something more sedate, more pedantic, and less interesting. Instead, I discovered a quirky, charming, poignant, honest book that felt very modern. In style, it could have been written by an excellent writer today, but the details of life probably wouldn't have felt so real or believable.

I love coming-of-age books, but this is even more. It's a nearly epic story of Francie's family in the immigrant slums of Brooklyn, from before her birth and through most of her teens. They struggle to persevere through poverty and other difficulties, but this generally isn't a somber book; Francie's perspective is aware but appreciative. The depth of the writer's understanding (Francie's in retrospect) is show more touching. We discover her extended family's secrets and flaws, why each person is lovable; we ache for their heartaches and we delight in their joys. I loved this book and loved Francie, the observant little girl who treasured life in Brooklyn. show less

this book is sociocultural archaeology for me. a very important book, i think. dealing with sexuality, poverty, religion, and other old taboo subjects in twentieth century America it is easy to see how iconoclastic this book was when it was published.

it reveals the hypocrisy of the June Cleaver 1950s and helps to explain what the ‘60s were rebelling against by showing a slice pre-1940s life.

straight forward and plainly spoken, the book must have seemed pornographic to much of the uptight, shame-based people of the ‘40s. the children find and play with condoms (although they are not named as such), female promiscuity is represented in Aunt Sissy, unwed teen mothers and the zealous derision and violence acted upon them by supposedly show more virtuous married women is shown, the stark reality of living in poverty and the lack of literacy and education hits hard, too. it would have been too much to take for many back then and i know that it was controversial when it came out. i think this book does a much better job of embodying the spirit of social rebellion that the Catcher in the Rye was supposed to have done and might serve to provide some insight into the more recent situations in Ferguson and Baltimore.

not that such hypocrisy doesn’t exist now (staunch, white, male anti-gay Senators who are caught with male prostitutes, Christian preachers who abhor adultery and find sex itself dirty are caught with prostitutes in hotels, etc…), but at that time, the cult of the Great White Patriarchy still held up a thick facade of double standards and cognitive dissonance that the “trouble” of the ‘60s helped to crack. we can now, at least, speak of such things openly without risking stigma, ostracization, or worse.

best of all, this book speaks about all of that in a matter-of-fact way that in no way lessens our caring for the characters. on the contrary: seeing things in the plain light of the book’s setting helps us to feel very close to Francie and her family.

i had always wondered about the title of this book. now i know and find it a strong and enduring metaphor. show less

It's easy to see how this book became a classic. The story is beautifully told; I enjoyed how it meandered along over six years in such an incredibly detailed and descriptive way. It wasn't that I couldn't put it down--in fact, it took me longer to get through it than most books of a comparable length--but it became a *friend* whose story I wanted to never end. Utterly quotable and ponder-worthy. :)

Warm and inviting, yet tempered with an awareness of daily hardship – a sort of proto-counterpart to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird – Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is part of a fine tradition in American letters. Told in simple yet often beautiful language, and with a keen eye for the cadences, textures and minutiae of life among good ol' American folks, Smith's famous novel becomes statuesque merely by telling, with grace and a homespun wisdom, the story of a poor working family as they try to get by in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century.

At first, it seems like the book won't ever rouse itself; whereas Harper Lee would later steel her own endearing "when I was a girl" story with the plotline of Tom Robinson's show more trial, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has no similar plotline to keep the reader on the right track. Particularly in the first half of the book, it can be difficult to identify why we should read the story; we do read it, for Betty Smith has great powers of observation, but a page or more on a trip to the local store to buy pickles can seem a bit redundant. It can be hard to fix upon any deeper literary merit, even after the titular metaphor is elaborated on by one character thus:

"'Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up out there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way…

If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful… But because there are so many, you just can't see how beautiful it really is. Look at those children.' She pointed to a swarm of dirty children playing in the gutter. 'You could take any one of them and wash him good and dress him up and sit him in a fine house and you would think he was beautiful.'" (pg. 95)

The subsequent progress of the story matches this metaphor, as we follow Francie Nolan from her young girlhood through to her late teens, and watch her develop into an intelligent, capable woman. Living in poverty, like that tree growing out of sour earth, she too transcends the harshness of her surroundings. As the story progresses, Smith's aptitude for slow-burning characterisation starts to pay dividends: even absent a plot, we enjoy looking in on the lives of Francie and her family. By the time we're finished, after nearly 500 pages, we don't want them to leave.

Reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has always been a minor ambition of mine, ever since I saw Perconte reading the book in the TV mini-series Band of Brothers nearly twenty years ago. I always thought it strange that American GIs would read such a book, and assumed that it was due to a lack of options. You take what you can get on a battlefront. However, having now read it myself, I can see why those homesick citizen soldiers turned to Betty Smith (the book, published in 1943, was hugely popular in its pocket-sized Armed Services Edition). A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has a warmth, a sense of place, a commitment to drawing characters with a sincere, uncynical decency, that would have been a home-brewed tonic to the brutality those soldiers would have been experiencing daily. This potency has only increased as old New York (and Western communal living in general) recedes into the mists of time. To a reader in the present day, scenes like the one on page 205, when Papa and the children lug a fresh pine Christmas tree up to the fourth floor of their tenement block – Papa singing carols all the while – can seem like reading of a lost world.

However, the warmth of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is never a cheaply sentimental warmth. Even despite its ending, which was a bit too Dickensian-fairytale for my liking, the moments in Smith's novel where our hearts ache at the tenderness are hard-won. There is poverty, and if it's not quite the stark, debilitating poverty of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published just a few years earlier, it's still very real. The stillbirths. The alcoholism. The scrubwoman working on her hands and knees while heavily pregnant. The threat of paedophilia which terrorises the mothers of the neighbourhood – a surprise inclusion, as the narrative we have nowadays is that this is a modern phenomenon driven by our over-sexualised culture. When young Francie rests with her arms on the window sill and looks up and sees "the stars high above the tenement roofs" (pg. 54), it reminds us how much innocence there is in the story, and yet at the same time the children are exposed to so much tragedy and poverty. It set me on a train of thought that perhaps much of our modern cynicism is due to our all-but-complete freedom from want, rather than any greater exposure we have to cultural violence and nihilism.

The book, despite lacking an identifiable plotline, accomplishes the commendable feat of standing tall, like a smooth piece of architecture that does not show the joins. A thread of humanity emerges and is reinforced, and begins to make even the concept of a plotline seem like an inferior choice. When the astute young Francie reflects on an incident with her Aunt Sissy, and puts "that nugget of knowledge away with all the others that she was continually collecting" (pg. 317), she shows us the open strategy of the writer. But A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is more than just a collection of childhood memories, sown together with great competency. When Papa sends flowers to Francie on her graduation (pg. 351), it's a well-earned moment of storytelling. When a group of Brooklynite workers "each chipped in a few pennies a day to hire a man to read to them while they worked. And the man read fine literature" (pg. 171), we feel the dignity of it. Thankfully, we don't need to have someone read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to us. We can read it ourselves, and it's often so damned good in its goodness that there's no reason not to.

"'People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,' thought Francie, 'something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place for shelter when it rains – a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone – just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.'" (pg. 457) show less