After finishing this book, I am amazed that I was never required to read it for school. I found this book to be poignant and beautifully, yet simply written. The similarities between the main character in this book, Francie Nolan, and the author of the last book I reviewed, Jeannette Walls, of The Glass Castle, reiterate to me the lives these women experienced are more common than one might think.
We watch Francie as she travels the terrain of her childhood and adolescence in her beloved Brooklyn, which she describes as dreamlike and different from any other place in the world. The simple prose used by Betty Smith in this book evoked such an emotional response from me as I read about Francie and her family and their life of poverty and hardship and love and joy. The gradual awakening of Francie to her true lot in life and her continued optimism in the face of that lot, is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. I found the descriptions in this book of a girl who gradually learns the truth about life and the people in her life to be honest and true, heartbreaking, beautiful and re-affirming, all at the same time. Yet again, here is a book in which the main character could easily have given in and been crushed under the weight of what she had been dealt by society and birth, but didn’t. Francie should be a shining light in the darkness for all of us who experience hardship.
Francie is told by her English teacher to write about beauty. When asked by Francie, what is beauty, the teacher offers her a quote from Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.” This book is filled with both. I highly recommend A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with its simple and beautiful and true message about the power of family, love and hope.
I give this book 5 out of 5 bookmarks.
Reviewed by: Anna