Francie, daughter of Irish immigrants living in the slums of Brooklyn in the early 1900s, possessed the broken nature of a child who’s been taught everything the wrong way. What struck me first, and angered me later, was the spontaneity of the characters. A bookworm myself, I was curious enough to open the novel. She didn’t seem to fit in, but she seemed happy being by herself with a book in her hands. Looking at the cover, I could identify with her.

Her short brown hair is pushed away from her face and the bold paint strokes of a tree trunk are visible behind her. The cover shows a young girl wearing a blue dress and blue headband, sitting precariously on a window ledge and reading a book balanced on her lap. Being cool was the only important thing, and if you weren’t cool, what were you, really? It was a time of transition, vulnerability and confusion.Ī worn copy of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” ended up in my hands one muggy summer day. I, like most other middle-schoolers, was struggling to keep up with the norms of the rest of my class and spent most of the day gossiping with my friends. I first read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” when I was in middle school, a time that I still identify as one of the nastiest stages in adolescence. It’s always in the center of everything, out of sight and out of mind, co-existing until someone from the periphery has the sudden urge to pick it back up again.

It’s as if I can’t bear to let it out of my sight every time I reread it, or as if the book can’t tear itself away from the countertop. Somewhere between the time when I first read the book five years ago and now, that spot on the kitchen island became the permanent spot for the novel.

Smith betty a tree grows in brooklyn