She was, in essence, the human version of my Google Alerts except that instead of searching the internet for mentions of UDPL and sending them to my email inbox, Francie would collect the articles by hand and mail them! Each day, she would take the train across the Brooklyn bridge to an office where she sat at a long table reading newspapers, cutting out articles that mentioned specific clients, and filing them in large envelopes. Betty Smiths debut novel is universally regarded as a modern classic. I was especially fascinated by Francie’s job as a newspaper reader. The focus on the smallest details gives it a rich and interesting historical perspective, although I can understand why some readers have called it “boring.” The narrative thread isn’t as important individual scenes, so it’s a fair critique to say that “not much happens.” Personally, I enjoyed all of the detail. Smith writes about Francie’s life in exhaustive detail. The story takes place over the course of six years in the life of an Irish girl named Francie living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn at the turn of last century. It does, as they say, “hold up” despite the fact that the story is set, in part, in 1916, a hundred years ago. I am surprised not only by how much I liked it, but also by how relevant and universal it remains. I decided to read it for exactly that reason – I didn’t know anything about it and thought I probably should. I recognized the title, of course, but I would have been hard-pressed to tell you what it was about. Review: I can’t explain why I never read this book despite four years as a public high school students, five years as a lit major at Penn Sate, and eight years as a high school English teacher, but somehow it slipped through the cracks. 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.

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. Title & Author : A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smithīook Challenge Category: A book that you should have read in schoolĭescription: 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. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a quiet, gentle, understated and yet at the same time unexpectedly scathing at times book that offers a window (or a view from a fire escape, if you please) into a little corner of the world a century ago, and yet still has the power to resonate with readers of today.

A tree grows in brooklyn