After two years, I closed Betty Smith's "A Tree grows in Brooklyn"

 

A tree grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith

1943

I have a hardbound copy of this book in my shelf as I had been intending to read this. The intention dates back before we moved in a new address so it must be before seven years ago. 

The irony is I finished reading this in my ipad.... And on top of that, just finished only this June 2024 when I started reading the ebook last August 2022. 

This book is not a difficult book to read and to love reading. It is just that I didn't feel like reading it in one sitting which was a hood thing because as I went along, it was like I grew up with Francie too. Each time I resume reading, I didn't forget though months passed. 

I felt the poverty of Francie and her determination to overcome it. She is sure on her way overcoming it. Thus, I felt longingness for her when I reached the end. 

"But this tree in the yard -- this tree that men chopped down... this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up its stump -- this tree lived! It lived! 

And nothing could destroy it."

This book may be about Francie's coming-of-age but it is also a story on how we all shift from our childhood's colorful and straightforward view of life to our adulthood's abstraction of colors. Being human is indeed colorful. As humans, the hardships and the poverty challenge us to prevail.

***

To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: This is your time on earth filled with glory.

*

Seems like I'm the most dissatisfied person in the whole world. Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!

*

They just wanted her to laugh -- such a simple thing and so hard to find out.

*

I taught them to be clean and truthful and not to take charity. Is that enough, though?

*

Oh the novel. I dashed it off at odd moments. It doesn't take long to wrote things of which you know nothing. When you write actual things, it takes longrt, because you have to live them first.

*

Yes. But I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food.

*

"Your father is dead."

"You're not to cry for him. He's out of it and maybe he's luckier than we are."

*

Most women had one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. It seemed like their great paons shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman... whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.

*

Swearing

They were emotional ecpressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect.

*

Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up.

*

The reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only -- the something different from anyone else in the two families.

*

Note: Photo of book jackets taken from the web