I’m deeply inside a great novel at the moment – the kind that when you read it, sometimes you lose track of which reality is real, yours or the novel’s.  I spent long hours this past weekend deep into the drama of this book that I remember reading back in the 7^th grade and loving.  I’m loving the re-read even more now.

Anyone looking for a little Inspiration during these times of recession and budgetary restrictions would do themselves a favor by picking up this charming and most well-written story and diving into it.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a novel by Betty Smith first published in 1943. It relates the coming-of-age story of its main character, Francie Nolan, and her Austrian/Irish-American family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The novel is set in the first and second decades of the 20th century. The book was an immense success, a nationwide best-seller that was distributed to servicemen overseas. It was also adapted into a popular motion picture, the first feature film directed by Elia Kazan.

Through it is often categorized as a coming-of-age novel, A Tree Grows… is much more than that. Its richly-plotted narrative of three generations in a poor but proud American family offers a detailed and unsentimental portrait of urban life at the beginning of the century.

The story begins in 1912, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where eleven-year-old Francie Nolan and her younger brother, Neeley, are spending a blissful Saturday collecting rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other scrap to sell to the junk man for a few pennies. Half of any money they get goes into the tin can bank that is nailed to the floor in the back corner of a closet in their tenement flat. This bank, a shared resource among everyone in the family, is returned to time and again throughout the novel, and becomes a recurring symbol of the Nolan’s self-reliance, struggles, and dreams.

If you think it’s a book for kids only, you’re wrong.  It is a book that all kids should read because it discusses in depth so many of the problems that kids face today – even though it takes place at the turn of the century.  Perhaps that’s why it’s lasted all these years.

But it’s also a good adult read.  At least it was for me anyway.  I found it to be a penetrating look at the times – so penetrating, that it pierces through time and reaches that universal and timeless quality that all great writings have.

It’s not particularly heavy on plot, rather it’s like looking through an open window on the back of your brownstone into the lives of your neighbor and watching their kids grow up.

It’s an American tradition and serves to connect us all with our roots as a people whether we’re rich or poor.

Give it a read or a re-read.  I recommend it highly.

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