One of the best that I have ever read

books:

	• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith Reader's Digest Association, 1989 - 414 pages average customer review:based on 553 reviews
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highly recommended

Could relate well

I really enjoyed this book. I was not sure what to expect from it. I actually found myself really relating to the main character. I really think it displays the thoughts of a girl who is growing up and trying to make decisions and observing all that is around her. I'm looking forward to getting more books by Betty Smith!

Kimberly B.

The title of the book that am reading is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Bettie Smith. The main topic of this book as it states in the foreword."The best anyone can say is that it is a story about what it means to be human." Represents that the novel about a little girl named Francie and her little brother named Neeley that wasn't just about how they pulled through in a poor neighborhood. It was about the real life struggles families have to go through.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a novel. The author of this novel was born on December 15, 1896 with the name of Elisabeth Wehner. She married young with a law student from the university of Michigan. She then had 2 daughters named, Nancy and Mary. She wanted to finish her schooling but she didn't finish high school. Although she was able to take classes and she was focusing in journalism, literature, and drama. The foreward states that the novel isn't just a book about "social issues" nor "class struggles". Its a novel when you read it you recognize yourself.

The main topic on this novel is that Nolan family of 4. Living in Willamsburg, Brooklyn. Trying to make ends meet with the father, Johnny Nolan, being the head of the family. Working as a singing waiter, And drinking his tips away. The Nolan family were very poor. they bought penny worth stale food.

This work addresses to many audiences, but i think the problem relates to a particular audience which is the ungrateful audience. The type of audience that have enough and wanting more.

At first the book confused me a little. The reason for this because the way the story was written in which i liked. But it started with Francie and how her life was. Then the next chapter it was about Francie's meeting. i got that part but the part where it was a chin scratcher was when the part where Mary and Sissy came in. Until I read on and understood that Sissy was Katie's sister, and Mary was her mother.

The book in general is great. But the part that I loved. Was the part where Francie went up to the fire escape and started to read on a Saturday. I like this part because it made me understand the difference between kids from then and now.

I completely concur with previous reviews. In which they state "A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life..." I recommend this book for all audiences to read.

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One of the best that I have ever read

I recieved this as a gift. I had heard of this book before, but when I started reading it, I was completely lost into it and could not stop reading it. it is rich and full of detail, and I can easily say that this book is one of the best that I have ever read.

Masterpiece

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 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 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 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!

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an endless classic

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!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The American classic about a young girl's coming of age at the turn of the century.

"A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life...If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience...It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships. The Nolans lived in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1902 until 1919...Their daughter Francie and their son Neely knew more than their fair share of the privations and sufferings that are the lot of a great city's poor. Primarily this is Francie's book. She is a superb feat of characterization, an imaginative, alert, resourceful child. And Francie's growing up and beginnings of wisdom are the substance of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
--New York Times

"One of the most dearly beloved and one of the finest books of our day."
--Orville Prescott

"One of the books of the century."
--New York Public Library

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