A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Another one of my favourite books at last on Kindle. Yaay!! My granny came from Jersey City to Scotland just before the period in which the story is set and my paperback was originally hers. She told me stories about the things mentioned in this book. It's a basic story of life in ordinary working class New York, but it has amazing little touches of real life, like the folk travelling in from Brooklyn all standing at the same time to see a clock to check if they were late for work or not. The tiny real details of life are celebrated and vividly brought to you in this story of a family's every day survival. Fab! Try it out if you can? You might love it as much as I do?

Enjoyed this book, very nostalgic. Hard times had by all. Ended a bit abruptly.

I've just reviewed a very clever novel that lacked the warmth and intimacy of this classic, which is emotionally involving from page to page. It's a raw but loving recreation of the author's poverty growing up in a family that survives deprivation and tragedy to hold together, and I felt a part of it. Somehow, as a 68 yr old British woman in a different time with a different life experience, I was young Francie, her mother Katie and aunt Sissy. To me that is the essence of the powerful connection fiction can make with the reader, and judged according to that criterion, this is a wonderful story, with characters worthy of love. No one reading it could fail to be moved, to laugh and feel vivid joy as well as grief. A beautiful book. Review by Sue Hampton, Leslie Tate's wife.

Love this book, read it years ago and was delighted to find it again and such a good price on kindle . This book has stayed in my mind for over 50 years that’s how beautiful it is. I would love a new generation to read it, coffee was never the same afterwards

The book itself is excellent, and I highly recommend it. But buy a different edition of it. This book was full of typos and random commas. It's like the "publisher" did an OCR scan of the book and didn't bother to proofread it before formatting it as an ebook. There were no page breaks for the new chapters. Very sloppy edition. I should have known it would be like this, considering how cheap it was. Buy elsewhere.

A family tries to raise themselves off the bottom rung of poverty in early 1900s New York. Centred around Francie, the daughter of a hardworking mother (“with a fierce desire for survival” p86) and an out-of-work drunken but loveable father (“hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer”), we see the family through the eyes of the young girl over the course of her childhood until Francie is able to earn a living for herself. The book oozes warmth and cosiness. Though there are severe hardships to endure, they are overcome by means of determination and a caring network of family and friends. What sets this apart from so many other novels is the delicious vocabulary. I particularly admired the stories the girl attached to numbers (see p165). Even things as ordinary as bricks, and hearth, and bathtubs are imaginatively described (p127). So well conceived, the tale seems obviously autobiographical, but evidently it is not – Betty Smith claims this to be merely the product of her creative imagination. Watch the film as well, though the film doesn’t follow Francie into the workplace. The film also avoids the controversy of the attempted sexual attack on the preteen girl by a serial maniac, though both film and book refer to the extra ‘touching’ penny the girl receives every time she visited the junk man. Page 145 sums up the novel rather nicely. “A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot straps has two choices: having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel up-climb.” This book follows the latter path.

It was a very lovely story that was hard to put down. My 0nly issue was that words were not always separated, which made it harder to read

Like another reviewer, I can't explain why it took me so long to discover this book. I can vaguely remember the advertisements for the Elia Kazan film based on it, but not the book itelf. I had recently promised to undertake some reviews of crime novels - something I enjoyed and I had a number to get through. Suddenly that stopped because I found this book, simply as a result of a chance remark, and I had to read it. Having done so,I had to read it again. I know and have read all the otherr contenders for the title of Great American Novel - The Great Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Kill a Mocking Bird - but I find they all fall short of this book. It has so much to say about the human condition and creates the perfect context in which to say it. The dreams we have, both for ourselves and for others, are represented by a young girl's love for a father who, in spite of loving her in return, has failed her. Her mother, virtually a drudge, has hopes for her children and, in her own small way, seeks to make them come true. In all the relationships there is a poignancy which tugs at the heart strings because most of us who think at all have experienced this same sense of wanting to do better, to be better people, to make a difference. This young girl eventually manages that and we rejoice for her.

Me encantó este libro. Debo confesar que tenía mis reservas, pero me enganchó enseguida. Una historia de superación que además ofrece una fotografía fiel del Brooklyn de principios-mediados del siglo XX, poblado casi en su totalidad de inmigrantes de múltiples nacionalidades europeas. La autora rememora su infancia, que puede calificarse de humilde, pero no miserable, pues no se entrega a la autocompasión. De hecho, a pesar de las vicisitudes pasadas, la evoca como un tiempo feliz. Un libro encantador en su género y una obra que querrás volver a leer. Muy recomendable.

What a beautiful, heart rending account of life in Brooklyn at the beginning of the 1900s and the trials and tribulations of the Nolan family. You are taken on their journey of hardship but with modern progress comes improvement and by then end of this story you feel the next generation being able to take a step up from the last. I loved it.

I first read this book many years ago, when I was in my early teens. One or two of the passages stuck in my mind for some reason, but other than that it didn’t make much of an impression on me. Now, reading it approximately 50 years later, I’m deeply impressed by it. It’s a tender, loving portrait of a forgotten world – tenement dwellers in Brooklyn in the years before World War I. The main character is Francis, a young girl of exceptional promise who has a talent for observing the world around her, finding the positive in almost everything, and writing. All the characters are drawn with sympathy and tenderness, including the alcoholic father, the dying neighbour, and the hard-working young mother. But what struck me most was the lost world in which the story takes place. These people had absolutely nothing at a time when (literally) a few pennies could make the difference between having and not having any dinner. The deprivation was of a kind that we in North America rarely see anymore: things like people living out their whole lives in the space of a few city blocks, babies dying for want of basic medical care, children contributing a few important pennies to the family’s struggle to eat each day, and so on. But these people kept on, and the determined few managed to build lives for themselves and their children. I understand that the author originally wrote this as a memoir, but was convinced by a publisher to rewrite it as fiction. What a remarkable childhood Ms Smith had, and what an exceptional person she must have been to be able to look back on those days with such fondness and tenderness. I highly recommend this book. As the cliché goes, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You’ll get lost in it and come away with a deep appreciation of how much things have changed for the better . . . and for the worse.

The story of the family tells us of what’s important for us and families.

A perennial classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, was first published in 1943. I don’t remember how old I was when I first read the novel, nor do I remember absorbing as much of the rich, sensitive writing as I have with this second, recent reading. The book, set in the early 1900s, rarely leaves the Brooklyn area and most of that takes place in rough tenement neighborhoods. It is tough living, especially for poor people. And Francie’s family is poor. Her mother scrubs floors in three tenement buildings to keep the family in food and rent. Her father works as a singing waiter, when he can get a job, but he has a serious drinking problem. Even so, he’s a loving father and his children adore him. Mary Frances Nolan, or Francie, is the oldest child, followed by her brother, only a year younger. Much later another little girl is born. The story is told mostly from Francie’s point of view. Francie is always thinking, her creative mind trying to make sense of what is going on around her. The hardships and rough living conditions are accepted, mostly without complaint, but her dreams soar with her imagination, intelligence and creativity. At that time and place, graduating from sixth grade was an impressive accomplishment, but Francie has the impossible dream of going to college. Francie’s life is metaphorically compared to a Chinese sumac, the Tree of Heaven, common to Brooklyn tenement yards. The tree is indestructible; can seemingly grow out of cement. Francie often sits on a fire escape in the shade of the tree’s umbrella-shaped leaves to blissfully read and dream. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant story of perseverance and hope amidst hardship. Even if you read this book years ago, it’s worth reading again. This second reading brought fresh insights and a deeper understanding of our country’s attitudes and values of that time period. I recommend this book for anyone twelves years and older. It is truly an American classic.