Katie and Johnny are the children of German/Austrian and Irish immigrants respectively and while both can read, neither’s education surpassed grade school. Together, Katie and Johnny create a world of love and stability for Francie and her brother, even if it is one set amidst severe poverty. Likewise, Katie’s resolve that her family will survive provides Francie and Neeley with a stable home. His grand ideas are tragically misinformed and often comic, but his love is real.
But, Johnny, Francie’s Papa, provides the love and warmth in Francie’s young life that Katie in her hardworking determination may lack. Her father, while a beautiful man with a gorgeous singing voice, falls into alcoholism and does little to reliably assist with the family’s financial circumstance. Her family’s financial struggles lead to days and weeks when Katie, Francie, and her brother, Neeley assuage their hunger by playing games that they are explorers awaiting a coming shipment of food. Like her neighbors in early twentieth-century Brooklyn, Francie’s life is not gentle. Upon Francie’s birth, her mother’s youthful naivety and joy gives way to sternness as she determines she must harden in order that her family might survive.
New mother Katie soon learns, well before she hits twenty, that the world is harder than she had imagined it to be. Francie is the first-born child of Katie and Johnny Nolan, and she is born when her parents are both very young and very in love. Smith’s description of family and the true-to-life flaws in all Francie’s forebears are both wise and moving. Ultimately this moving coming-of-age novel explores the American promise that poor American kids, the grandkids of immigrants perhaps, might realize and the magic of that promise. It is also, however, the story of her parents and their love, her aunts and grandmother, her neighborhood at large. Set, as the title suggests, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this rich novel focuses on the story of Francie Nolan.
Suffice to say, this is a beautiful novel that blooms with hope and life.Ī Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of one girl’s coming of age in the 19teens. It was a marvelous companion read for a trip to New York, but it was also a moving novel about a family’s generational struggle with poverty. The daughter and mother of a teacher, and a teacher herself, I can see why my grandmother would have championed Smith’s novel. Later, I discovered it was my maternal grandmother’s favorite book, which made it even more dear to me. It is an American classic that I had somehow not yet read. I picked up Betty Smith’s American masterpiece, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), to read on my family’s trip to New York City last month.
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