Book Review: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith

July 10, 2023

I am going to be honest with you, I picked this book up because I liked the illustration on the cover and I was in need of a new book. I knew nothing of this classic, other than that I had heard the title before and knew that it was “a classic”

When I was younger I read a lot of period pieces, but since getting out of college I think this has been my first one. I am just more drawn to more dramatic books because they hold my attention a little better than the sweet books.

This book was sweet, but it was also sad and educational. I learned so much about what life was like at the turn of last century and the struggles that came with it. It is funny how you can know things without really knowing them. I knew that there was a pretty big divide between the upper and lower classes but I did not know what those things really looked like ( watching the titanic didn’t really get the point across ) and there was a very large divide.

Work was very different back then. Now it feels like you work at your passion or you are miserable, and they may have been miserable back then, but they had to decide that they weren’t going to be because that was their only option. They had a job so they were choosing to be happy about it.

Francie, the main protagonist, starts out the book as a young girl in a poor immigrant family in Brooklyn. Her father, Johnny, is a singer, who is always looking for work and is wildly optimistic about catching his big break. He has a beautiful voice, is joyful and ridiculously handsome, but his downfall is his alcoholism, and it ends up killing him. Rather than taking care of his family, he uses the money that he makes on drink and leads his wife, Francie’s mother, to clean houses in order to take care of their children. Katie is a beautiful, elegant woman who has grown to be a little cold. She loves Johnny very much, and Francie talks about how much she can see their love throughout the whole book, even when Katie is struggling, even when Johnny has had too much to drink.

Throughout the course of the book we follow Francie through school and young adulthood. This book does not shy away from scary things such as poverty, sexual assault, loss of innocence, loss of family members and finding one’s self. It is beautifully written and I understand, now, why this book has been considered a classic for so many years. I highly recommend.