Events, Reading Room

January 2024 – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

January 2024 - Wed., the 10th @ 7PM

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn By: Betty Smith

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.
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Discussion Questions:

  1. What significance does the title of the book “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”  symbolize?
  2. Betty Smith paints the American Dream as living better than your parents did. Is this still the American Dream? How does the pursuit of a better life both help and hurt the characters in the novel (or people who live today)?
  3. Francie observes more than once that women seem to hate other women (“they stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman”), while men, even if they hate each other, stick together against the world. Is this an accurate appraisal of the way things are in the novel?
  4. Francie’s heritage is described as strong women “of invisible steel” on her mother’s side and “weak but talented” on her father’s side. By the end of the book, how are Francie and Neely both alike and different from their parents?

 

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