Brooklyn, Pre-Hipster Era

Challenge #6: Read a high school classic over which your K-12 education somehow skipped.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Page Count: 401/493

I’d first like to echo Katherine’s apologies about letting this blog lie fallow for such a long time (see the usual host of excuses, foremost among them being “life”).  Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep it up this time around!

I feel like this is a very appropriate challenge for this time of year.  I don’t know how your schools worked, but, starting in the summer before sixth grade in my district, all students were given a reading list, expected to select one of the titles within, and come into English class on the first day of the new academic year.  I came across some good books this way – Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes to mind.

As Katherine mentioned in her post introducing this month’s challenge, there are indeed a lot of stereotypical high school books that neither of us has read.  Originally, I was going to seek out The Catcher in the Rye, but Idle Time Books didn’t have a copy and I had, in any case, head many a complaint about the protagonist’s penchant for whinging.  Instead, Katherine recommended to me A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is one of those books I always see on Barnes & Noble’s “notable paperbacks” table but have never picked up.

This novel concerns the coming of age of one Francie Nolan in the early twentieth century, when Brooklyn was not yet populated by fixed-gear bikes and organic food co-ops and still home to impoverished immigrant neighbourhoods.  Though nominally fiction, it’s heavily rooted in the author’s own experiences.  I’ve got just under a hundred pages left to read, so I’ll leave all further comments on the book after I am finished with it!