A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith; narrated by Kate Burton | 2002; originally published 1943 | Harper Audio | Audiobook $ 19.95

A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity. His wife Katie scrubs floors to put food on the table and clothes on her children’s backs, instilling in them the values of being practical and planning ahead.

When Johnny dies, leaving Katie pregnant, Francie, smart, pensive and hoping for something better, cannot believe that life can carry on as before. But with her own determination, and that of her mother behind her, Francie is able to move toward the future of her dreams, completing her education and heading off to college, always carrying the beloved Brooklyn of her childhood in her heart.

This title has been on my to-read list for forever. In an advanced language + lit class in high school we were assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye, which was not my thing. Meanwhile, my friends in the regular class were reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which they all seemed to love. I knew I’d have to check it out for myself someday.

The story basically follows the childhood of a working-class girl in Brooklyn (of course), from her earliest years to about 1917–1918. It’s told mostly from her own POV. However, significant portions of the book are really stories about her own parents and grandparents and other relatives. So this is a coming-of-age novel, yes, but it’s also a kind of family vignette.

Practically every review I’ve seen online for this book raves about it, and nearly everyone I’ve talked to about it IRL, too. I guess I’m a bit of an outlier for just feeling kind of meh about it.

There were a few things that I really enjoyed about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. First, I was really charmed by the descriptions of the historical setting and related activities of the characters. The penny candy shop, the complicated laundry, the grocery shopping and cooking, the schoolroom, the tenements, the press clipping service — all goings-on and places of a bygone time, which all serve wonderfully to immerse the reader fully into the story.

I also enjoyed the family history portions of the narrative. I think these sections are often the least-liked by other readers, because they don’t directly include the main character and they don’t serve to further the plot at all. But I could read a whole book of just this family’s intimate little stories going farther and farther back into the past and be satisfied.

Francie is a plucky little thing; not too Pollyanna-ish, but the sort of kid who faces lots of serious difficulties with gumption and a good attitude. I appreciated that her perception of her parents and the other adults in her life changes as she grows up; she eventually begins to understand them as complicated, imperfect people. This is a good contrast to the often two-dimensional treatment of grown-ups in children’s lit.

The women in the story, who are the primary focus of the narrative, are all really wonderfully complicated and realistic. They can be smart but make stupid choices. They can be loving but impatient. They can be motherly but sexual beings. They can be hard workers but rely too much on unreliable men to take care of them. A lot of historical fiction, especially the sort written for children, can tend towards gender essentialist simplification of the female characters, so I appreciate that this wasn’t the case in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

That said, I ended up being rather annoyed with both the main character and her mother by the end of the story. Francie “falls in love” with a guy after she goes on two dates with thim; he tries to get her to sleep with him, but backs off after she confesses that she’s younger than she pretends to be for her job. She writes to him, only to find out that he’s married; she’s heartbroken. This is all the typical kind of romantic drama you’d expect of an inexperienced teenager, NBD.

But… when she cries to her mother about it, the woman basically tells her that she’ll probably always regret not hooking up with the guy and no future romance can ever compare with a girl’s first big love. MA’AM. That’s possibly the shittiest advice a mother can offer, but it’s not treated with the same “people are complicated and sometimes make mistakes” kind of attitude as her earlier bad choices, like playing favorites with her son and making her daughter drop out of school. It’s treated as just another depressing fact of life, another lesson to be learned by the main character and therefore presumably the young reader. Which is gross.

Francie then takes this to heart and regularly fantasizes that she’s meeting up with the guy that got away when she’s going out on dates with a different dude, totally undermining a comparatively legit relationship for the sake of that first manipulative bastard. This gets even more complicated because this second young man is a college boy who is also aware of how young she is, and he chose to basically low-key groom her to be his future wife anyway (not in a physical way, but in a historical gentlemanly-but-patronizing way), which is in and of itself a bit icky.

I can certainly see why this book is considered a classic of the coming-of-age genre, and overall it was enjoyable to read. And yet — sometimes you encounter a story that everyone else seems to love, but it leaves you feeling overall unimpressed; that’s this book, for me.

Links:

Publication information: Smith, Betty. A tree grows in Brooklyn. New York, NY: HarperAudio, 2002. Audiobook.
Source: Public library, via Hoopla.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.

Share this!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply