“ A tree grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith is an interesting book. Every chapter talks about the poverty in the 20th century in America. The author, Betty, does not only refer poverty as the lack of food, shelter, etc. “Tree” is a coming of age story and that is one reason why I believe it should be in the ninth grade curriculum. This book teaches us about poverty, the fall of innocence, education, and sexuality.
The lights on the christmas tree shone different colors across the faces of the children as they roasted marshmallows in the fireplace. Half empty hot chocolates sat beside them. How the Grinch Stole Christmas played over the television set, not quite drowned out by the children's laughter and discussions of what presents they would be getting the next morning. The man, in this moment, couldn’t help but notice just how beautiful his wife was. The way her nose crinkled up, when she laughed with the children, the way she snuggled closer to him while watching the movie.
Mary Frances “Francie” Noles is the main character of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn; a story about a poor second generation immigrant family living in Brooklyn during the early 1900s. Despite the fact Francie is a young child, she has been made to endure the hardships of living in extreme poverty. She is inquisitive, lonely, resourceful, curious, and honest. Francie’s endearing, childlike wonderment and compassion are contrasted perfectly by her analytical, wise-beyond-her-years perception of the world. Francie’s nativity protects her from the sadness and demoralizing conditions of tenement life, but the hardships she can understand are surmounted by her tremendous strength of will making her a likeable character.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a coming-of-age novel by Betty Smith that tells the story of Francie Nolan, a young girl growing up in poverty in Brooklyn during the early 1920s. Throughout the book, Francie and her family experience adversity and prejudice. Through these experiences, the book explores the themes of classism and poverty through the characters of Ms. Gardner, Johnny Nolan, and Katie Nolan. Ms. Gardner, Francies English teacher, demonstrates the discrimination and classism that many impoverished people of the time faced. Her beliefs came to light when she was reading one of Francies assigned compositions.
Tenement districts in Brooklyn throughout the early 1900s provided challenges that entire families were forced to handle. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, depicts the Nolan family facing difficulties that even children had to overcome while they lived in one of these districts. Francie Nolan, the main character of the novel, is faced with the greatest difficulty of them all: growing up. Poverty was one aspect of Francie’s life that caused her to lack certain fundamental features of a regular child’s life. This is shown through Francie consistently being without food due to poverty, and having to discover for herself in a very difficult way that hunger was a painfully real issue.
In the novel Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson the author uses the ‘Tree’ motif to show that Melinda’s growth though the whole book because In the first quote, Melinda is using the tree to represent how she feels as if nobody can see her. In the second quote she shows how she feels out of place. In the third quote she talks about how with some improvement, the tree could be better. Just like how with some improvement she could be better. In the beginning of the novel, the motif of Tree represents how Melinda is develops as a human, deals with her rape and all its aftermath, and discovers who she is without other people to identify her, her trees also become more complex.
I stand tall like the pines surrounding me, my body craving the sun, hoping to feel the warmth of the rays on my skin while the presence of the forest engulfs me. As the mountain chickadees begin their daily call, I feel the mountain air fill my lungs bringing me back home with each inhale. A slight breeze tugs at my hair and sends my soul tumbling to the worn trails leading back to the days I spent growing with my family in the wilderness. My parents first met in college while working at REI, they got engaged on a backpacking trip, were married in the sawtooths, and spent their honeymoon biking across southwestern Washington. When I was nine months old they took me on my first bikepacking trip; I rode behind them in a canary yellow trailer,
They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place… Without taking his eyes from her, he twitches a little at the knee, then the shoulder, where a fly devils him. Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks… It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant’s afternoon?
The wind whipped past my head as I pushed myself faster. I could see the break in the trees up ahead, the sun shining on the poppy field through the small opening. I ran as fast as my legs would travel, my heart beating out of my chest. I could hear the footsteps coming closer and closer. My lungs were about to give out, my hips were burning from the running and my feet were starting to swell in my boots.
The approach of autumn was well on its way. “Autumn’s hand was lying heavy on the hillsides. Bracken was yellowing, heather passing from bloom, and the clumps of wild-wood taking the soft russet and purple of decline. Faint odors of wood smoke seemed to fit over the moor, and the sharp lines of the hill fastnesses were drawn as with a graving-tool against the sky.” As Ellie drove down the road she was much more aware of all her surroundings.
I looked out from the passenger side window as we pulled into our parking spot. The trees were beginning to go bare in the frigid October weather, and the ground was covered in their dry, crispy leaves. The four of us were going on a haunted hayride tonight, a popular past-time for season. We clambered out of the car and left our bags behind. It had rained the day before, and it made the ground beneath us soft with mud and trampled leaves.
In Sarah Orne Jewett’s piece, “A White Heron”, tension is continuously built to give a sense of meaning to a young girl’s climb. Her success hinges on her ability to come to and understanding with the wise old tree, so the evolution of their relationship is dramaticized. Even at the start of the piece, the tree’s presence is felt. The author uses personification and polysyndeton to give it qualities similar to an old, wise, tired grandfather who has just encountered something that he’s never seen before. It has outlived the whole forest of “pines and oaks and maples”.
As I stepped out onto the field, my gaze drifted upward. The sky was speckled with millions of tiny, glittering stars. We were so isolated out here that even the Milky Way was visible. I had never seen it in person before. That’s just one of those things that only happens at camp, the most magical place I know.
Small, stagnant puddles, on the uneven planks of timber wood reflected the dark, brooding sky above - rarely disturbed by the callous slices of moonlight seeping through the clouds, creating a specular reflection through a ripple in the languid water. Surrounding the lake, lay a rigid, pine forest, which stretched far past the mountainous boundaries - rising high, around the solitary lake. A death-like mist pervaded through the trees enveloping them in a gelid, cutting fog. A silent, lonely willow shivered as the still, biting air engulfed its aged branches in an icy cage and suffocated its stiffened lungs, causing each freezing breath to drag. Crusted leaves stacked one on top of the other as
Bits of nature—water, wind, trees, shadows—are weaved into every part of her childhood. She says that, day by day, “cool morning breezes swept freely through [her] dwelling” and that “the mere shifting of a cloud shadow in the landscape near by was enough to change [her] impulses” (Zitkala-Sa 75). Zitkala-Sa’s attachment to land and nature is most obvious near the end of her work, when she compares herself to a tree while reflecting on the effects of her eastern boarding school education. She says, “Now a cold bare pole I seemed to be, planted in a strange earth” (112). Trees are not meant to be “shorn of [their] branches” and “uprooted,” as she was, but are supposed to remain where they were “planted” (112).
