Book Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I inherited this book from my grandma's book shelf, and picked it up to read without knowing a single thing about it, except that somewhere I'd heard someone say it was supposed to be good.

It's a coming-of-age story about a girl named Francie Nolan who lives in poverty in Brooklyn, NY in the early 1900s. Right from the first page I fell in love with the way the author uses words. She constructs sentences beautifully without being too flowery. She describes things so that you can picture them perfectly in your mind without over-doing it. Here is an excerpt from the first page: "The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looke 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 tenement districts.
You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brown stone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the windowsills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
That was the kind of tree in Francie's yard. Its umbrellas curled over, around and under her third-floor fire escape. An eleven-year-old girl sitting on the fire escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That's waht Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer."

I love the way the author uses this tree all throughout the book as a metaphor for things/people growing out of nothing to become something, even when no one else really wants them to.

I love the way the author portrays the "American Dream" not as something that happens instantaniously, but as something that happens over a long period of time, with each generation getting a little closer and a little closer. How parents work hard, knowing they probably won't improve their status, but with the hope that they can make it a little better for their kids. And those kids in turn try to make it just a little better for their kids, and so on. It seems more realistic to me that the whole rags to riches bit.

I identify really well with the way Francie looks back at certain moments of her childhood and remembers what she learned and knows that she is who she is now because of those moments. I think all of us do that in one way or another whether we realize it or not.

I like they way the author portrayed family as a very important aspect of life. I also like how she portrayed people has good, even though they had some serious faults. That's really how we should look at people. And really, I loved how the author did the characters in this book, I thought they all were done really well and seemed like they could be real people. Mostly this book is a book about people and how they are with each other and with themselves. There isn't a whole lot of action in the book, but mostly reflection, and reflection of people, why they are the way they are. I really like it. The book didn't feel slow moving to me even though there wasn't a whole lot of suspense in it.

I would definitly recommend this book to anyone interested. There are some swear words in there, mostly in the dialect of the people. And there is mention of sex, but no graphic details. I think this book is well written, makes a good point, and is enjoyable to read.