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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780061120077
ISBN number: 0061120073
Label: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 528
Printing Date: June 01, 2006
Publishing house: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Release Date: May 30, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 1791
Studio: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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.
Amazon.com Review:
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 very first published over 50 years ago. Her frank writing about life's squalour was alarming to some of the more genteel society, but the book's humour 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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Rated by buyers 
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i missed this book in high school. twenty years later, i am so glad to discover this book. although it may be geared to young adults, everyone can relate to this family and francie, the young heroine. don't let this book get by you!
Rated by buyers -
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 very 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 very 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 very 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!
Rated by buyers -
Of all Brooklyn literature, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", has probably the most charm and magnetism for everyone, who reached for it at least once.
The story of the Nolan family from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, comes to life in the book - and the novel is really heartfelt, very much because of simple, but poetic, suggestive and emotionally engaging language. Betty Smith managed to write a timeless piece, not only because of what she wrote about, but largely due to the lack of mannerisms and phrases fashionable in the 1940's, when she wrote "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn".
Francie Nolan, a gifted girl who loves books and decides to be a writer (an alter ego of the author), who is 11 years old at the beginning of the book, is a daughter of Katie, a strong, pragmatic, honest, down-to-earth woman of Austrian descent, who supports her family being a cleaning lady, and Johnny, an Irish, heavy drinking romantic, earning some money now and then as a singing waiter. Francie has a year younger brother, Neely, and although the children are often hungry and cold, and try to earn money, selling scrap metal, they have the love of their parents, their own good nature, and a happy childhood as a result.
The plot follows Francie from 11 to 16, when she goes to college, but also goes back in retrospective as far as the childhood and family lives of Katie and Johnny. Francie is at the center of the story, growing from a dreamy, shy child into a bright, imaginative woman. The lives of the Nolan nuclear family and numerous relatives and neighbors are described in a series of anecdotic pieces, which could make very good short stories, like snapshots of everyday life of the poor neighborhood, where people are resourceful and full of character. These stories, however, are masterfully tied together into this brilliant novel, which made me laugh and cry, moving me to the core, and teaching important lessons of the essence of humanity and American spirit.
Betty Smith wrote a wonderful novel which will inspire generations to come, and immortalized the atmosphere of Brooklyn at the beginning of twentieth century. Thinking of this book simply as of "coming of age" novel does not do it justice - it is much more than that.
Rated by buyers -
I ordered this book as it was my book club selection, very sure I would not find it terribly interesting. What a surprise it turned out to be! This is a very readable, colorful story of an immigrant family in early 1900's Brooklyn. With every page, Betty Smith carried me away to these neighborhoods and ethnic communities. I loved the trip.
Rated by buyers -
As a senior citizen and former New Yorker, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book after all these years
Although it takes place in the 1910-1920 era, there were many things that came to my memory ( or what's left of it! )
I did a lot of reminiscing.
I highly recomend it.
especially if your an old timer and a New Yorker
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