Book Review

Been so busy with our recent move, amongst other things I volunteered for. But now it is summer and I can finally find some time to get some reading in.

Ryan and I listened to this book on tape during our recent vacations.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a 1943 novel written by Betty Smith. The story focuses on an impoverished but aspirational third-generation-American adolescent girl and her ethnically-blended family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City during the first two decades of the 20th century. 

The novel is split into five "books," each covering a different period in the characters' lives. Book One opens in 1912 and introduces 11-year-old Francie Nolan, who lives in the Williamsburg tenement neighborhood of Brooklyn with her 10-year-old brother Cornelius ("Neeley" for short) and their parents, Johnny and Katie. Francie relies on her imagination and her love of reading to provide a temporary escape from the poverty that defines her daily existence.

Book Two jumps back to 1900, with the meeting of Johnny and Katie, the teenage children of immigrants from Ireland and Austria. Although Johnny panics when Katie becomes pregnant with first Francie and then Neeley, and begins drinking heavily, Katie resolves to give her children a better life than she has known, which her mother, Mary, embodies in the word and idea, "education." 

In Book Three, the Nolans settle into their new home and the children (now seven and six) begin to attend the squalid, overcrowded public school next door. Francie enjoys learning even in these dismal surroundings, and with her father's support, she gets herself transferred to a better school in a different neighborhood. 

At the start of Book Four, Francie and Neeley take jobs since there is no money to send them to high school.

As Book Five begins in the fall of this same year, Francie, now almost 17, quits her teletype job. She is about to start classes at the University of Michigan, having passed the entrance exams. Before she leaves the apartment, she notices the Tree of Heaven that has grown and re-sprouted in the building's yard despite all efforts to destroy it, seeing in it a metaphor for her family's ability to overcome adversity and thrive.