People of all classes in society were reading the book when it first came out. Since most of the novel takes place between and , place it was even then a nostalgic trip back to an innocent time before the two World Wars.
Today, the book remains a classic, read widely among school children. Oprah Winfrey called it one of the ten books that has deeply affected her life. Perhaps its popularity is partially attributed to Smith's sympathetic portrayal of her characters. Within the book's pages, people cannot be moralized or reformed; they are what they are, sometimes even without explanation. She also wrote many plays before her death in SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
Themes Motifs Symbols. Important Quotes Explained. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. But it is the book's emotional life that has kept it in print. Though the recording angel, its center of consciousness, is Francie, the dramatic center is her mother, Katie, filled with ambivalences that will determine the lives of her children.
The study of Katie is bold, deadly, without sentiment: a disenchanted mother who without hatred wishes the alcoholic husband dead ''He's worthless, worthless.
And God forgive me for ever finding it out'' , and who coolly plots her future once he is out of the way. The mother who acknowledges her preference for her son over her daughter -- she loves him more -- but who depends on her daughter's salary and who asks her forgiveness.
It is the mother who says of the daughter: ''She does not love me the way the boy loves me. She does not understand me. The novel's famous set pieces are Katie's labor pains, the attempted rape of Francie, Francie's graduation flowers from her dead father, and Aunt Sissy, who works in a condom factory a Broadway musical version made her the protagonist , faking pregnancy: she claimed the reason she wasn't ''showing'' in front was that the baby she was carrying was in the back.
The book's determination to fill in all the details, to get everyone and everything in, and to follow its heroine through adolescence, leaves it shaggy -- the movie does a firm editing job on its dutifulness. But Smith has a treasure lode and she knows it -- and in this one book she gives all of it away. The intensity of her recall provides the book with its graceless but sincere sentiment and style.
Smith's three subsequent novels do not repeat the material or power of her first. And the more ambitious ''Maggie-Now'' is a study of the Irish in America. The books are plodding and intelligent, oddly melancholy, but they lack the neurotic impulses and driven recall of her first. Smith wrote that one book we each have in us, and hers remains the most telling Brooklyn novel, our best depiction of this city's poor at the turn of the century.
It is the Dickensian novel of New York that we didn't think we had. It's like -- yes -- a dream. But it's true, and that means there's really no time to waste on something that, though not terrible, just isn't doing much for me.
Rinda Elwakil. During my adolescent years a short run program on television was Brooklyn Bridge, a show about life in Brooklyn during the s. The last line of the show's theme song was "that place just over the Brooklyn Bridge" will always be home to me. When I think of Brooklyn, my mind goes back to a more wholesome time when city children could stay out late and parents did not have to worry about their well being, where children frequented the penny candy store and rode on paper routes after school.
This was the Brooklyn of the s, yet by immersing myself in Betty Smith's timeless A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for two days, I entered into an environment that was both wholesome and dangerous and a perfect setting for coming of age: the Brooklyn of the s.
The Nolan parents may have been born in Brooklyn, but both only had an eighth grade education and had been working in factories from the time they were fourteen. By the time they married as older teenagers, the Nolans were relegated to a life in the tenements, living paycheck to paycheck. The only way they could afford their apartment was through Katie working as a janitress in the building.
Here is where we first meet Francie, age eleven, a girl who her grandmother Mary Rommely noted was destined for a special life. As Francie and her brother Neeley, aged one year younger, came of age they had to endure many hardships.
Between Johnny's drinking and Katie's meager earnings, there was no telling where the family's next meal would come from. Yet, Katie persevered because she wanted her children to have a better life than the one she had. She had Francie and Neeley read a page of the Bible and a page of Shakespeare each night before bed, and exchanged her work as a janitor for piano lessons from two spinster women who lived downstairs.
Between this self-education and Johnny's constant lessons in civics and politics, the Nolan children had more education than their parents ever had. One place that was free was the public library. Francie was determined to read one book a day for the rest of her life. Through reading she uplifted herself from the rest of her neighborhood despite the extreme poverty in which she lived.
Katie taught her children to be proud of their station in life and never accept charity. Through hard work, religion, and education, the next generation would endure. I thought these messages were timeless, as well as the sisterly chats between Katie and her sisters Sissy and Evy, which eventually grew to include Francie when she reached her teen years.
Girls grew up fast then, a girl frequenting the library one day, to a teen working in a factory the next. I thought Francie's exchanges with Katie and Sissy about life were especially poignant, as I watched Francie grow up before my eyes. Betty Smith was born December 15, , five years before Francie Nolan.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was her first novel, and an autobiographical account of her life until she left for college. It generated much acclaim, even initially, because as writer Anna Quindlen points out in her forward, that no matter what station in life you are in, a person can see oneself in Francie Nolan.
Perhaps if I had read this book when I was eleven, I may have thought this way. Yet, by reading this classic for the first time as an adult, I found it to be a charming, historical fiction, coming of age story; however, not one that left me bawling and would change my life. For an adolescent girl reading this for the first time, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would be a special experience.
As Francie is about to leave her childhood behind, she points out that Brooklyn is a special place, not like New York, and one has to be from there to understand it. These sentiments echoed Quindlen's writing, as I came to experience the magic of early 20th century Brooklyn. Betty Smith ties up her ending happily because this is what happens in the first part of her life.
She would go on to be a novelist and playwright, and a reader can expect the same bright things for Francie Nolan. For an eleven year old girl, reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a magical experience and sure fire five star read. As an adult, I can appreciate the life lessons learned as well as the timeless of the setting.
I enjoyed my time with Francie and her family and rate this classic 4. Smith drew from her own experience growing up in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century to create the character of Francie Nolan. But A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much more than a coming of age story.
Its richly-plotted narrative of three generations in a poor but proud American family offers a detailed and unsentimental portrait of urban life at the beginning of the century. The story begins in , in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where eleven-year-old Francie Nolan and her younger brother, Neeley, are spending a Saturday collecting rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other scrap to sell to the junk man for a few pennies.
Half of any money they get goes into the tin can bank that is nailed to the floor in the back corner of a closet in their tenement flat. This bank, a shared resource among everyone in the family, is returned to time and again throughout the novel, and becomes a recurring symbol of the Nolan's self-reliance, struggles, and dreams.
Those dreams sustain every member of the extended Nolan family, not just the children. Their mother Katie scrubs floors and works as a janitor to provide the family with free lodging. She is the primary breadwinner because her husband Johnny, a singing waiter, is often drunk and out of work. Yet there is no dissension in the Nolan household. Katie married a charming dreamer and she accepts her fate, but she vows that things will be better for her children.
Her dream is that they will go to college and that Neeley will become a doctor. Intelligent and bookish, Francie seems destined to fulfill this ambition - Neeley less so.
In spite of or perhaps because of her own pragmatic nature, Francie feels a stronger affinity with her ne'er-do-well father than with her self-sacrificing mother. In her young eyes, Johnny can make wishes come true, as when he finagles her a place in a better public school outside their neighborhood. When Johnny dies an alcohol-related death, leaving behind the two school-aged children and another on the way, Francie cannot quite believe that life can carry on as before.
Somehow it does, although the family's small enough dreams need to be further curtailed. Through Katie's determination, Francie and Neeley are able to graduate from the eighth grade, but thoughts of high school give way to the reality of going to work. Their jobs, which take them for the first time across the bridge into Manhattan, introduce them to a broader view of life, beyond the parochial boundaries of Williamsburg.
Here Francie feels the pain of her first love affair. And with determination equal to her mother's, she finds a way to complete her education. As she heads off to college at the end of the book, Francie leaves behind the old neighborhood, but carries away in her heart the beloved Brooklyn of her childhood.
No matter your age or your place in life the rich prose A Tree Grows In Brooklyn will fuel your dreams and bring joy to your heart as you are transported to another time. Loved it from page 1 Slow paced and really descriptive but I loved it. I really enjoyed learning about life back then for the Nolans Highs and lows of life and daily experience I was so emotionally attached to Francie.
She was a brillant character and I loved her to pieces. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a quiet, gentle, understated and yet at the same time unexpectedly scathing at times book that offers a window or a view from a fire escape, if you please into a little corner of the world a century ago, and yet still has the power to resonate with readers of today. After all, the world has moved forward, yes, but the essential human soul remains the same, and the obstacles in human lives - poverty, inequality, cruelty, and blind self-righteousness - are in no danger of disappearing.
It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts. If you ask me, I think it's a story of people simply being people, the good-bad-and-ugly of humanity.
There are so many things coexisting in the pages of this not-that-long book. On one hand, it's a classic coming-of-age and loss-of-innocence tale centered around the experiences of a young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. On another hand, it is a social commentary taking on the uglier parts of human lives and human nature - the parts that Francie was cautioned against writing about as they are quite 'sordid': poverty, vice, exploitation, intolerance.
On yet another hand yes, I'm running out of hands here it's a story of American dream - hopeful and determined. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food. On yet another hand apparently my 'hands' example may as well involve an octopus it is a chronicle of a struggling Brooklyn family with the love and resentment and strong ties that only the members of the family can try to understand.
On some other hand, it's a story of what it meant to be a girl and then a woman in the world of a century ago in America. And, on yet another hand, it is an ode to Brooklyn that through the prism of this book appears to be a universe of its own.
It is also a story of opportunities lost and opportunities gained despite the odds. It's a story about the will to survive no matter what, about iron-clad will and determination, about hope despite the odds, despite being, for all intents and purposes, on the bottom of the barrel. It's a story about learning to love and respect and compromise and give up - and frequently all at the same time.
It's a story about being able to open your eyes to the world around you as you grow up and learning to see this world for what it is, and accept some of it, and reject some, too. It has love and loss and pain and happiness and wonder and ugliness - all candidly and unapologetically presented to the readers allowing them to arrive at their own conclusions just as Francie Nolan has arrived at hers.
Apparently when this book was published in mids, it caused a wave of disappointment and disagreement with the subject matters it raised, the subject matters that some of the public, like the well-meaning but clearly clueless teacher Miss Garnder in this book, probably found too 'sordid' for their taste: the poverty, the pro-union message, the lack of condemnation of female sexuality, the alcoholism, the treatment of immigrants unfamiliar with their rights, the exploitation of the poor and weak ones by those in power - you name it.
It seems there was too much of the social message presented with not enough of polishing it and coating it with the feel-good message.
And yet the system - as well as the still-not-understood undershades of human psyche - instead of uniting these people in their hardships ends up somehow pitting them against each other. That privilege was reserved for a small group of girls They were the children of the prosperous storekeepers of the neighborhood. Francie noticed how Miss Briggs, the teacher, beamed on them and seated them in the choicest places in the front row.
These darlings were not made to share seats.
0コメント