A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The Rommely women
2. Johnny the dreamer and Katie the rock
3. School, the library, and Saturday pennies
4. Christmas 1915 and the year everything breaks
5. Jobs, Ben Blake, and a soldier who lies
6. Leaving Brooklyn and what lasts
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked this up because a friend kept leaving it on my kitchen table with the spine cracked open to the middle. I knew the title the way you know a song title without knowing the words. A tree, Brooklyn, something sad and hopeful. I did not expect a 500 page childhood that moves as slow as real summers and then knocks you flat around Christmas.

First published in 1943 by Harper and Brothers in a 493 page first edition, the book follows Mary Frances Nolan, called Francie, from age eleven to almost seventeen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The edition I am summarizing from is the Harper Perennial paperback, ISBN 9780060736262, listed at 443 pages. The story runs from 1912 to 1918 or so, through school changes, factory jobs, a death, a birth, and a wedding. It is not plotty in the thriller sense. It is a record of how a smart poor girl learns to notice everything and save herself with reading and schooling.

Francie lives with her brother Neeley, a year younger, and her parents Johnny and Katie in a tenement flat. Money comes in coins. Katie scrubs floors in apartment houses. Johnny sings for tips as a waiter when he is sober enough to work, which is not often. The kids sell junk, run errands, pick up coal, and bring home bread that is a day old. They have a tin can bank nailed to a closet wall where Katie drops pennies for a future piece of land. Saturday is a ritual. They go to the junk dealer, count the cash, buy a small treat, and pretend for an hour that they are rich.

What I loved right away is how physical Smith makes poverty without turning it into misery porn. The hallway smells of cabbage and lye. The fire escape in summer is the living room. Francie reads a book a day from the branch library, sitting on the stairs where light falls, and she tells herself stories about the neighbors. The tree of the title is the tree of heaven, a weed tree that pushes up through concrete in their yard even when the landlord tries to kill it. Francie sees it every day. Smith does not hit you over the head with the symbol at first. It just sits there, dusty and stubborn.

The Rommely women

Williamsburg in 1912 is crowded with Irish and Austrian and Italian and Jewish families stacked on top of each other. Their flat is small and dark but Katie keeps it fierce clean. She mops, she boils sheets, she throws out anything that smells of rot.

Katie comes from the Rommelys, and the Rommely sisters shape the book as much as the Nolans. Mary Rommely, the grandmother, came from Austria, cannot read English, tells her daughters to get educated and buy land. Sissy, the oldest aunt, is big hearted and loud, married three times, calls all her husbands John until Steve makes her stop. She has lost ten babies at birth and still mothers everyone. Evy, the other aunt, is married to a tired milk driver named Willie Flittman and holds her own house together with plain sense. Eliza became a nun and barely appears.

As a kid reader you might skim these women. As an adult I slowed down here. Smith gives each sister a theory of how to survive being a woman with no money. Sissy uses love and bodies and charm. Evy uses work and temper. Katie uses hardness and planning. Mary uses faith and saving. Francie watches all four and tries to stitch together something for herself. It is one of the best parts of the novel, though it also makes the middle feel packed. You meet a lot of cousins and neighbors and you have to keep them straight.

Flossie Gaddis across the hall and the candy store man who gives Francie extra because he likes her serious face show how Smith loves a two page neighbor who appears once and stays in your head.

Johnny the dreamer and Katie the rock

Johnny Nolan is the parent Francie adores and the parent who cannot keep them fed. He is handsome, first generation Irish American, has a sweet tenor voice, tells stories, takes the kids for walks and ice cream when he has a dollar and disappears when he does not. He drinks. Not cute drinking. The kind where he loses jobs, lies shaking on the bed, and Katie has to wash him and send him out again. He loves Francie in a way that sees her. He helps her get into a better school outside their district by borrowing an address. He tells her she is bright and will be a writer.

Katie is the opposite engine. She married at seventeen, had Francie and Neeley fast, works cleaning stairs and halls while pregnant and after. She loves her kids but shows it in food and clean clothes and saved pennies, not hugs. She admits to herself, and Smith lets us see, that she favors Neeley because he is easy and sunny, while Francie is watchful and reminds her of herself. Francie feels the coolness and spends half the book trying to earn a warmth Katie does not know how to give.

This split is the emotional core and Smith does not pick a side. Johnny gives Francie imagination and permission to want more. Katie gives her toughness and math. Johnny dies and Katie lives, and Francie needs both to get out. I found Katie hard to like for the first hundred pages. She scolds, she withholds, she seems cold about Christmas and birthdays. Then you see her scrubbing floors at six months pregnant, coming home to cook, mending shoes at midnight, and you realize Smith is showing what it costs a woman to keep four people alive on a charwoman wage in 1915. It changed how I read her second half.

Fair point to make now because it comes up a lot in reviews. Johnny is romanticized. Smith loved her own father figure and it shows. His alcoholism is described truly, the shakes, the lost weeks, the shame, but the narrative still lets him stay charming. If you have lived with addiction in a family, some scenes may feel soft. Katie has to carry the consequences while Johnny gets the good lines. I think Smith knows this, because Katie gets the last word in most chapters, but it still stung me.

School, the library, and Saturday pennies

Francie loves school the way some kids love church. Her first school is overcrowded and rough, fifty kids, a tired teacher, spitballs and smell. She learns to read early and then reads everything. Dime novels, Shakespeare, the Bible, fairy tales. She works her way through the library alphabetically, or tries to. She writes stories and gets in trouble for writing about real life, drunks and hunger and sex, when teachers want pretty lies.

The Saturday ritual deserves its own paragraph because readers remember it for decades. Francie and Neeley collect rags and metal all week, sell them, put most in the tin can bank. Then they are allowed a pickle or a movie, sitting on the fire escape to watch the street.

Johnny helps Francie transfer to a school in a nicer district by claiming they live with relatives there. It is a lie and Smith presents it without apology. Poor parents in the book lie to priests, teachers, landlords, and charity ladies because the truth gets you nothing. Francie learns to code switch early. At home she speaks flat Brooklyn. At school she learns proper grammar. At the library she learns how to be quiet and invisible so no one stops her from staying past closing.

I liked these chapters best on reread. They are funny and warm. Neeley trading marbles, Francie trying to look American and clean for a teacher she admires, Sissy bringing food when Katie is too proud to ask. The pace is slow in a good way. You live a year in forty pages. The only drag for me was a stretch where Smith lists every book Francie reads and what she thought. Bookish readers will eat it. Others may skim.

Christmas 1915 and the year everything breaks

The middle of the book turns cold. Katie is pregnant again. Johnny tries to stay sober and cannot. He gets pneumonia after a winter of drinking and weak lungs and dies on Christmas Day 1915. Smith does not make it noble. He dies in a hospital cot, Katie washes his body, the insurance money goes to a decent burial because Katie will not have him buried cheap. Francie is fourteen and does not cry at first. She later cries while graduating from grammar school because he is not there.

Around the same time Francie is attacked by a strange man on the stairs and Katie shoots him to save her. It happens fast and shocks the tone. Katie is calm after, tells the police plainly what happened, goes back to work. Francie understands in that week that her mother would kill to protect her even if she rarely says love out loud. It is a brutal way to learn it and Smith does not dress it up.

Baby Annie Laurie is born in May 1916. Francie graduates in June. Her graduation story, which she wrote truthfully about her neighborhood, is rejected by her teacher Miss Gardner for being sordid. Francie rewrites something false to graduate and feels sick about it. That small defeat matters more than it sounds. It is the first time Francie sees that school rewards nice stories over true ones, and she decides she will write true ones anyway later.

These hundred pages are heavy and great. The writing stays plain. No big speeches. Katie cancels the kids insurance to save money, takes in sewing, Francie and Neeley look for after school work. Neighbors bring soup. Sissy takes the new baby when Katie needs sleep. Grief sits in the flat like another person. My criticism is only that Smith rushes past Johnny death customs to get to graduation. I wanted one more scene of Francie and Neeley talking about him instead of suffering alone. They grieve side by side but rarely together, which feels true to kids but lonely to read.

Jobs, Ben Blake, and a soldier who lies

High school costs money the Nolans do not have, so Francie and Neeley go to work at fourteen and fifteen. Katie decides Neeley will go to high school first because he needs forcing while Francie will find a way on her own. It hurts Francie and Smith lets it hurt. Francie works in a factory making artificial flowers, breathing glue, then lies about her age to get a better job reading newspapers in a press clipping office. She likes the reading job. She sees her name in print for items she clips. When America enters the war the office fades and she learns teletype work.

Neeley becomes a newsboy and runner, good with people, easy in the street. He grows into music, piano and dance halls, and starts to look and act like Johnny without the drink, or not yet. Francie worries and loves him and envies his ease. Their sibling bond is one of the truest things here. They fight over money, cover for each other with Katie, share books and jokes no one else gets.

Two boys matter in this stretch. Ben Blake is a serious high school kid who tutors Francie for college exams in summer school. He is poor too, studies at night, wants to be somebody. He respects Francie brain first. They pass exams together, fail some, try again. He gives her a quiet promise at the end, not a big engagement, more like wait for me. Lee Rhynor is the opposite, a soldier on leave who flirts, walks Francie home, pretends love to get sex before shipping to France. Francie falls a little, then learns he is engaged to someone else. It ends without ruin but with shame and anger. Smith writes it plainly and kindly. Francie was lonely and wanted to be chosen. The man used that.

I appreciated that Smith does not punish Francie for wanting sex or attention. Sissy has already taught her that good women can want things. Katie has taught her to be careful. The Lee episode is short, maybe thirty pages, and some readers find it rushed. I found it honest. First heartbreak at sixteen often is rushed and stupid and teaches fast.

Work chapters also show Smith limits. The factory boss, the office manager, the teletype teacher are types more than people. After the rich neighbor portraits early on, these work adults feel thin. The point is Francie learning to type and read fast and save for courses, not the boss psychology, but I noticed the drop.

Leaving Brooklyn and what lasts

Katie accepts Michael McShane, a retired policeman turned business owner who has liked her for years. He is kind, older, steady. He offers a house and money for school. Katie says yes after long thought, for safety and a decent man. Francie fights it at first, then sees her mother laugh for the first time in years and stops.

Francie passes her exams with Ben help and gets ready for the University of Michigan in the fall. The family prepares to leave the old flat. In the last pages Francie watches a new little girl named Florry reading on a fire escape. Francie thinks hello and goodbye to her younger self in one breath. The yard tree, which the landlord tried to chop, has sprouted again.

The ending is sentimental but earned. No miracle money, no sudden fame. Just a girl with schooling ahead, a mother married safe, a brother playing piano, a baby sister who will never know the worst years.

So what drags. The book is long and episodic. If you need tight plot, the middle will test you. Some passages preach about thrift in a way that sounds like 1943 advice columns. Male characters outside Johnny and Neeley and Ben are thin. The attack scene and Johnny death are handled so sparely they can feel abrupt. And Smith sometimes tells you what a scene means instead of letting it sit.

Why it still hits. Francie feels real on every page. She is priggish and generous, snobbish about books and kind to drunks, hungry for beauty and practical about pennies. Katie is one of the toughest mothers in American fiction without becoming a saint. Sissy is unforgettable. I closed it thinking about my own fire escape books as a kid and how reading was both hiding place and ladder.

Read it in paper chunks, not a rush. Give the first eighty pages time. The payoff in the last hundred is quiet and strong.

FAQ

When was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn published and how long is it?

First published in 1943 by Harper and Brothers in a 493 page first edition. The post uses ISBN 9780060736262, a 443 page Harper Perennial reprint with cover on Open Library.

Who are the main people in Francie Nolan life?

Francie, her brother Neeley, mother Katie who scrubs floors, father Johnny a singing waiter who drinks, aunts Sissy and Evy, grandmother Mary Rommely, friend Ben Blake, and Michael McShane who later marries Katie.

Does the book feel dated or slow in places?

Yes in parts. Johnny stays charming despite addiction, work bosses are thin, the middle wanders through neighbors, and Smith sometimes explains scenes. Francie, Katie, and Sissy still carry it.