A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the coming-of-age story of Francis Nolan an American girl living in Brooklyn with her family in the early 1900's. This story spans her childhood and teen years, and covers the family's history from 1900 to about 1918. Both of her parents have lived in America their whole lives, but her mother's family is of Austrian descent and her father's family is of Irish descent. Her father, Johnny Nolan, loves to sing and drink, and that is really about all. He doesn't have a steady job, so her mother, Katie Nolan, cleans to make ends meet. While Francie doesn't have a lot she never seems to be too aware of the hardships her family faces.
Francie loves to read and write, and she aspires to be a writer. Her father moves her to a nicer school where richer kids go so she will have more opportunities. She goes the library often and reads several books every day. For one year she tries to keep a journal, but fails. Later on in life Francie's love of reading really pays off for her and helps her find a job where she earns more money per week than her parents did combined every week. This book is a joy to read for a lover of books because there are so many long passages about the importance of education, of reading, and about the joy Francie experiences when she goes into the world of books. I saw a lot of myself in Francie because of that, and also in her teenage years when she tries to spite her mother just for the sake of showing she is grown-up and idolizes her father in spite of his flaws.
The audio version I listened to was narrated by Kate Burton. She did a great job of having different voices for each character and had the early American and immigrant accents down perfectly. I have to say I'm always a little put off by the different character voices some readers do, but I got used to her quickly and looked forward to being read to by her. There was some musical interludes on the audio I listened to, mostly between each book (there are five books each spanning a different time period and with a different focus) which I found extremely strange, but I suppose it provided a nice break between readings. It's a very long audiobook, fifteen hours total, and took me quite awhile to finish but I found that it was a great book to leave and come back to after a few days.
The best thing about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that you spend so much time with the characters in different parts of their lives that by the end of the book you really feel like you knew them and what they went through. This was a great book to read after The Jungle, which I read earlier this year, because it shows a more rose colored picture of early American immigration and what was seen as important to those people. That's not to say the book is without heartache--- because their is plenty of it. At least three times I started to cry while listening to this book at work because Betty Smith wrote such believable characters that you really empathized with them, and because Kate Burton did a fantastic job bringing these characters to life on audio.
I give this book and the audio version an A.
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