Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In today’s world, it’s ground zero of the hipster renaissance. It’s more expensive to live in Brooklyn lately than it is to live in Manhattan. But it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, when A Tree Grows in Brooklyn takes place, Williamsburg was where the immigrants and/or poor people lived. People like Francie Nolan and her family.
If you’re a fan of plot-driven novels, this probably isn’t going to be the book for you. Nothing much really happens…two young people, the children of Irish and German immigrants, meet, fall in love, and marry. They have two children, a girl and a boy. The father, Johnny Nolan, is charming and sweet-natured but fundamentally weak, incapable of holding down a steady job because of his alcoholism. The mother, Katie Nolan, is strong-willed, hard-working and tries but fails to hide her preference for her son over her daughter. The family lives in poverty, barely scraping by, as the children grow up. Francie, the daughter, is the center of the story, and the plot is largely about her poor but otherwise mostly unremarkable childhood…
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