Francie Nolan, the heroine of this book in the way heroine was meant to be used, is a delightful tour guide through the rough and hardscrabble life of turn of the century New York. My mother describes this as her favorite book of all time, and she desperately wanted to share it with me when I was young. I was a devotee of fantasy, devouring Dune, Lord of the Rings, and anything to do with King Arthur, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn seemed far to ordinary to me to gift it with more than a few pages of reading.
Reading it now, however, from the vantage point of my forty-something life, I see fantasy in it - the vastness of the future that Francie sees for herself as she goes on a mythic quest for education, hungry for the rich details of life seen as pieces of a whole, and not as dead ends as so many in her neighborhood saw them.
The book is also a delighfully vivid picture of life in the 1910's, showing us the human, struggling side of America that is difficult to find in most history books, preoccupied as they are with the overarching themes of our nations growth. But Francie shows us these same themes embodied in the day to day life and actions of our citizens. She allows us to eavesdrop on the very citizens for which the ideals of this country were made - the ideal that through hard work and perseverance, anyone can better themselves and achieve a dream, no matter how far removed form reality the dream may seem when it begins.
This book is gentle, raw, and unflinching in it's look at how life and people were at that time and place. Morality is a goal, but life is lived as it needs to be. The people in Francie's world are just as varied, flawed, complex, and real as the people in my own life today. This book is a wonder, and left me inspired to live my own life in a bigger and better way.
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