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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Perennial Classics) Kindle Edition
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century.
From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for the often harsh life of Williamsburg demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family’s erratic and eccentric behavior—such as her father Johnny’s taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy’s habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce—no one, least of all Francie, could say that the Nolans’ life lacked drama. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the Nolans’ daily experiences are tenderly threaded with family connectedness and raw with honesty. Betty Smith has, in the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, captured the joys of humble Williamsburg life-from “junk day” on Saturdays, when the children of Francie’s neighborhood traded their weekly take for pennies, to the special excitement of holidays, bringing cause for celebration and revelry. Betty Smith has artfully caught this sense of exciting life in a novel of childhood, replete with incredibly rich moments of universal experiences—a truly remarkable achievement for any writer.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2009
- File size2319 KB
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A young girl's coming-of-age in the early 1900s, set in Brooklyn's Williamsburg slums, filled with drama, heartache, and joy.Popular highlight
There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory.3,278 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.3,228 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter. Johnny had a hankering after immortality which made him a useless dreamer. And that was the great difference between these two who loved each other so well.2,881 Kindle readers highlighted this
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From the Back Cover
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. 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. 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.
About the Author
Betty Smith (1896–1972) was a native of Brooklyn, New York. Her novels A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Tomorrow Will Be Better, Joy in the Morning, and Maggie-Now continue to capture the hearts and imaginations of millions of readers worldwide.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
By Betty SmithHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Betty SmithAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0061120073
Chapter One
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house, and warmed the worn wooden fence. Looking at the shafted sun, Francie had that same fine feeling that came when she recalled the poem they recited in school.
This is the forest primeval. The murmuringpines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green,
indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld.
The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.
You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
That was the kind of tree in Francie's yard. Its umbrellas curled over, around and under her third-floor fire-escape. An eleven-year-old girl sitting on this fire-escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That's what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer.
Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn. Oh, how wonderful anywhere! People were paid on Saturday and it was a holiday without the rigidness of a Sunday. People had money to go out and buy things. They ate well for once, got drunk, had dates, made love and stayed up until all hours; singing, playing music, fighting and dancing because the morrow was their own free day. They could sleep late -- until late mass anyhow.
On Sunday, most people crowded into the eleven o'clock mass. Well, some people, a few, went to early six o'clock mass. They were given credit for this but they deserved none for they were the ones who had stayed out so late that it was morning when they got home. So they went to this early mass, got it over with and went home and slept all day with a free conscience.
For Francie, Saturday started with the trip to the junkie. She and her brother, Neeley, like other Brooklyn kids, collected rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other junk and hoarded it in locked cellar bins or in boxes hidden under the bed. All week Francie walked home slowly from school with her eyes in the gutter looking for tin foil from cigarette packages or chewing gum wrappers. This was melted in the lid of a jar. The junkie wouldn't take an unmelted ball of foil because too many kids put iron washers in the middle to make it weigh heavier. Sometimes Neeley found a seltzer bottle. Francie helped him break the top off and melt it down for lead. The junkie wouldn't buy a complete top because he'd get into trouble with the soda water people. A seltzer bottle top was fine. Melted, it was worth a nickel.
Francie and Neeley went down into the cellar each evening and emptied the dumbwaiter shelves of the day's accumulated trash. They owned this privilege because Francie's mother was the janitress. They looted the shelves of paper, rags and deposit bottles. Paper wasn't worth much. They got only a penny for ten pounds. Rags brought two cents a pound and iron, four. Copper was good -- ten cents a pound. Sometimes Francie came across a bonanza: the bottom of a discarded wash boiler. She got it off with a can opener, folded it, pounded it, folded it and pounded it again.
Soon after nine o'clock of a Saturday morning, kids began spraying out of all the side streets on to Manhattan Avenue, the main thoroughfare. They made their slow way up the Avenue to Scholes Street. Some carried their junk in their arms. Others had wagons made of a wooden soap box with solid wooden wheels. A few pushed loaded baby buggies.
Francie and Neeley put all their junk into a burlap bag and each grabbed an end and dragged it along the street; up Manhattan Avenue, past Maujer, Ten Eyck, Stagg to Scholes Street. Beautiful names for ugly streets. From each side street hordes of little ragamuffins emerged to swell the main tide. On the way to Carney's, they met other kids coming back empty-handed. They had sold their junk and already squandered the pennies. Now, swaggering back, they jeered at the other kids.
"Rag picker! Rag picker!"
Francie's face burned at the name. No comfort knowing that the taunters were rag pickers too. No matter that her brother would straggle back, empty-handed with his gang and taunt later comers the same way. Francie felt ashamed.
Continues...
Excerpted from A Tree Grows in Brooklynby Betty Smith Copyright © 2006 by Betty Smith. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FCK65W
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books (March 17, 2009)
- Publication date : March 17, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 2319 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 528 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 006092988X
- Best Sellers Rank: #32,232 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #25 in Classic Historical Fiction
- #69 in Classic American Fiction
- #81 in Classic Literary Fiction
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of Francie Nolan and her family. She grows up in the tenements in Brooklyn and yearns to be educated. She reads a book every day from the library and is determined to read them all. Her brother Neeley and herself struggle to survive and collect scrapes and other items to try to get food to survive. Their mother Katie is a hardworking woman who cleans three tenement buildings to give them somewhere to live. Their father, Johnny, is a dreamer who works as a singing waiter, but drinks away most of his income. Will Francie be able to work her way to a better life?
This novel is a book that you don’t read fast for the action, it’s a book that you read slowly to enjoy the beauty of the writing and a look into the past that you don’t usually see. Books tend to focus on the middle and upper class, and it is the rare book that actually delves into how hard life was if you were living in poverty. What the kids had to eat and their lack of food was really sad. I felt bad for Katie. Johnny was the fun parent, but Katie kept it together and tried to make fun games so that her kids didn’t know what they were missing. She did not receive the same love from Francie that Johnny did.
The novel also takes a realistic look at alcoholism and its real impact on the family. Johnny is a likeable guy, but I liked how people’s perceptions of him changed when they realized the hungry kids next to him were his own kids. He was in the thralls of the disease of alcoholism and he couldn’t figure out to get out. This book did not sugar coat the impact it had on him and his family.
The book did not have a straight forward narrative and had different sections that skipped around between 1912 when Francie and Neeley are kids, to around 1900 when Katie and Johnny meet and fall in love, back to 1912 and moving forward as the kids grow up. I liked the way the narrative flowed.
There were so many scenes of this book that I loved. I love how Johnny helped Francie to go to the neighborhood school that she really wanted to go to. I couldn’t stop thinking about when Francie saw her neighbors stone an unmarried mother who was strolling her baby. I read that author Betty Smith witnessed a similar scene as a child and it helped inspire this book. I liked how Francie noted that the only difference in the unmarried mother and others was there the unmarried mother didn’t have a father to force her sweetheart to marry her.
Francie had an interesting job toward the end of the novel. It took me awhile to figure out what exactly she was doing and then I realized she was basically a human Google at the time reading through papers to find information that people would pay for research. I thought it was fascinating.
I watched the movie version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn years ago on Turner Classic movies and I loved it. Johnny does not match the description in the book and it leaves much of the story of the book out, only focusing on the 1912 part of the story. I’ve found a copy of it and I’m hoping to schedule a movie showing next month for the Back to the Classics Book Club.
Rogue Book Club thought the book was interesting, but was not sure why it is such a beloved classic. Would the club have felt different if we read it when we were younger? I’m looking forward to talking about this book at Classics Book Club tomorrow night.
Favorite Quotes:
“She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.”
“Because the child must have a valuable thing called imagination. The child must have a secret
world which live things that never were. . .. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.”
“A person who pulls themselves up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he left behind him in the cruel upclimb.”
“Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet it costs nothing.”
Overall, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a great look into poverty in the early twentieth century and an inspiring story of how one girl’s determination and hard work could get her out of it. It is a beautifully written novel.
Book Source: I purchased a copy from Amazon.com last year.
There is a moment that I think seems to signify the title of the novel quite eloquently. It is when Francie’s mother Katie Nolan is speaking to others about her baby, who is struggling to live: “Who wants to die? Ever thing struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of the grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of the sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.” I think this a fitting quote and moment because it typifies the entire struggle of the Nolan clan, symbolic of their poverty and their circumstances, yet the tree’s struggle and will to live a metaphor for courage and perseverance amid those difficulties.
This is not a book where there are ultimately rainbows, unicorns and butterflies on the other side of desperate times and life’s harsh realities. At times, the novel can be quite depressing and many characters struggle hard fights and sometimes lose in painful ways, and you feel for them.
Nevertheless, I think this adds to the power of the novel because Smith has an honesty approach in telling her tale. There’s a lot of pathos and emotion amid A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and so I was glad to be reading another book alongside this one to sort of balance everything out.
On a side note, I know this book is often categorized as a “young adult” novel, but I would sort of question that due to some of the subject matter.
I think A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a very powerful book. It does take an emotional investment on the part of the reader at times but, ultimately, we become invested in the Nolans and Francie and their lives.
I thoroughly enjoyed this historic book.
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Além disso, há problemas com espaçamento/organização principalmente de trechos de músicas e canções que aparecem, aspas que abrem sem jamais fechar, e a cada 150 caracteres há a supressão de um espaço, fazendo com que as palavras fiquem grudadas. Nenhum cuidado por parte da editora/Amazon, claramente sem nenhuma atenção humana.
Nem sempre o avanço da tecnologia é benéfico.