A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (P.S.)
by Betty Smith
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Book Summary Information
Author: Betty SmithEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05-30
ISBN: 0061120073
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780061120077
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (P.S.)
Book Review: Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I only recently got around to reading Betty Smith's 1943 memoir-cum-novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, mainly because it had a reputation as an Oprah Winfrey sort of book, meaning I thought it must be one of those tomes filled with good intentions but short on literary merit. After all, the first mention of it I can recall was a snide comment in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon from the 1940s. Boy, do I love to be wrong about things like this. The novel is a total masterpiece. At almost 500 hundred pages there is not a thing I'd cut- not a chapter, paragraph, sentence, nor word. It is a work of fiction the equal of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and some other great works like John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, and the best of Kurt Vonnegut and William Kennedy. In fact, it might be the best of the bunch.
In fact, it's more than great literature. It personally resonates with me because its depth and narrative immersion in a bygone world rivals that of the best of memoirs, including my own True Life series. I include it, now, along with Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass, Alex Haley's The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, Leonard Shlain's Art And Physics, Loren Eiseley's autobiography All The Strange Hours, and Terry Matheson's Alien Abductions, as the most personally influential and resonant books I have read. Aside from that it is a perfect example of what the publishing industry used to do right versus what it does wrong now.
In many ways ATGIB is a very similar story to 1996's Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt. The later book follows a poor Irish American boy who will grow up to be a writer for his first nineteen or so years, while this book chronicles a poor Irish-German American girl who will grow up to be a writer for her first sixteen or so years. AA is set three decades later and the family goes from America to Ireland, and then Frankie goes back to America, while Francie Nolan remains in Brooklyn, until heading off for college at novel's end. Both books feature strong mothers who endure alcoholic husbands, and both books have colorful families to sketch, as well as great poverty, but ATGIB is a far superior book to AA. Primarily this has to do with editing. AA is a 450 page book that could have been 300 pages, and included far more. But, in it, McCourt tends to ramble on far too much, and recount far too similar stories, with the effect of boring you. His book revels in suffering for suffering's sake. ATGIB, was submitted as a memoir, but the editor urged Smith to make it a novel, which helped her flesh out the characters and smooth over rough spots. It worked, for ATGIB is a compelling, poetic, and multifarious work, where AA is a spotty work of unrealized potential. I submit these two books as Exhibits A and B in the case of poor editing for most current books' being so poorly written, rather than just bad writers.
The book ends with Katie Nolan accepting a marriage proposal from a retired police sergeant and widower who has long been enamored with her. He offers to adopt Francie's youngest sister Annie Laurie and to send Neeley and Francie to college. Francie readies to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the University of Michigan. As she stops past her old apartment building she sees the cut down but still growing Tree Of Heaven resprouting in the tenement yard. She sees a small girl named Florrie Wendy, for whom the tree will also come to represent something, just as it must have represented something to her older neighbor girl Flossie Gaddis before her. That all three girls have names that start with F is not coincidental. That the tree that is chosen as the titular tree is a nondescript tree is all the more apt. It is, along with Melville's white whale, one of the greatest metaphors in fiction. Yet, even as the book ends the reader wants to know more of what will happen in Francie's life, even though none doubts she will perdure.
I am eager to read other of Smith's novels, to see if this was merely part of a continuum, or some great work that rose far beyond any other in her oeuvre. The scenes she so deftly set in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn are indelible, and even if her other works are not on par, this book alone is one of those near-miraculous things that justifies the 99.9% of bad arts being out there. Now, back to the crap!
Summary of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (P.S.)
The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.
Francie Nolan, avid reader, penny-candy connoisseur, and adroit observer of human nature, has much to ponder in colorful, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She grows up with a sweet, tragic father, a severely realistic mother, and an aunt who gives her love too freely--to men, and to a brother who will always be the favored child. Francie learns early the meaning of hunger and the value of a penny. She is her father's child--romantic and hungry for beauty. But she is her mother's child, too--deeply practical and in constant need of truth. Like the Tree of Heaven that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive. Betty Smith's poignant, honest novel created a big stir when it was first published over 50 years ago. Her frank writing about life's squalor was alarming to some of the more genteel society, but the book's humor and pathos ensured its place in the realm of classics--and in the hearts of readers, young and old. (Ages 10 and older) --Emilie Coulter
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