A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

By Cara Lane
I finished this amazing novel admittedly a few days before deciding I would start this 100 books, 1 year thing. But because I finished it so close to when I came up with my ingenious plan, I see no reason not to include it.

I don't think that many people have really heard of it, but it's a novel by Betty Smith about a girl growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. A friend had bought it for me for Christmas this year and I didn't pick it up until recently. And when I did, I wasn't encouraged at first. The first 20-30 pages seemed to drag on and on and on about Francie (main character's) descriptions of the food her mother made, the clothes her father wore, the street they lived on, the way other kids acted around her. This is what we're dealing with-

"There was a special Nolan idea about the coffee. It was their one great luxury. Mama made a big potful each morning and reheated it for dinner and supper and it got stronger as the day wore on. It was an awful lot of water and very little coffee but Mama put a lump of chicory in it which made it taste strong and bitter. Each one was allowed three cups a day with milk. Other times you could help yourself to a cup of black coffee anytime you felt like it."

I was completely dulled out. But I kept going because I had nothing else to do. Even though in my head I would read these early parts of the book thinking, "Please let something interesting happen. Now. Now. Now. I'm going to put it down right now if I read another line about mushy bread, I swear..." I kept going. So there's a personal victory.

Reading those seemingly droning descriptions seemed to defy all writing logic to me. I just finished a book a week or two before about writing that specifically warned against dull descriptions of things that don't relate to the story. So naturally that was all I could think about. But what I came to realize was that all those things actually were central to the story, and I was a bit too quick to judge. I'm not going to get into a whole plot analysis here but the gist is that Francie comes of age and whatnot- all that typical bildungsroman stuff- but somehow there was more to it. Even though the family is poor and the father is a depressed alcoholic and the mother loves her son more than her daughter, you feel for each of them in a certain way. The way that Francie's father can be so parasitical to the family in monetary terms but yet so nourishing emotionally was really interesting to me. You just don't read stuff like that. I actually found myself crying when he died. (Sorry if that spoiled anything!)

I'm very glad that I read it. Plus it's a very quotable book and I often found myself penciling little parentheses around certain passages that could be taken out of the book and used in real life situations. That means 99 to go. Next up is Homecoming by Bernard Schlink.