A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

this is the sort of book that never gets old. it's not simply the story of francie, a young girl growing up in the early part of the twentieth century in the tenements of ny; it's the story of every girl no matter who she is or where she lives. when i first read it at fourteen it made me laugh out loud and it made me cry. when i read it again at forty and again just now at eighty-two those same emotions washed over me just as they did when i was a young girl. i would recommend this book to every girl, no matter her age or circumstances.

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

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?

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.

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.

I wasn’t sure at first, but once I got into this book, I loved it. The writing style seems simplistic, but is very powerful and creates such clear imagery. The characters grow throughout the book in such a relatable way.

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.

Such a beautiful read , enchanting

The story starts with the narration of a little girl named Francie Nolan descendant of Irish immigrants living near Brooklyn at the beginning of the 20 th century. The family has to struggle through a life of poverty and its exposure to the fierce rules of working conditions of that period. Her father, a dreamer, gets only access to odd jobs, whereas her mother is the down-to-earth woman who finally becomes the principal source of income. Despite this almost desperate situation, the story tells also about hope and positive developments by beliefing in oneself and continuous striving for a better life. Francie dreams since she was a little girl of becoming a writer and against all odds she manages even to study at university.

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 real page Turner with endearing characters. Enjoyed every minute of it. I don't suppose today's Brooklyn looks the same.

Un libro muy recomendable. Nos hace vivir la adolescencia de Francie, una etapa difícil para todos y en este caso en un entorno no muy favorable. Es una historia de supervivencia y esperanza plasmada de realismo y de la posibilidad de vencer dificultades cuando los lazos familiares se mantienen, particularmente entre padres e hijos y entre hermanos.