A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN Book Club Questions, 21 Discussion Prompts

Betty Smith packed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with arguments about poverty and dignity, about the cost of loving a weak person, about what education actually buys, and about whether resilience is a virtue or simply what survival looks like from the outside. The questions below work for book clubs, AP seminars, and honors classes reading the novel as adults. No right answers. Plenty to argue about.

Why A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Works for Book Clubs

Few American novels offer book clubs this much material across this many themes. The novel covers three generations of immigrant women navigating poverty in early twentieth century Brooklyn, which gives readers entry points through character, setting, history, and personal experience simultaneously. Johnny Nolan’s charm and his destruction give the group something genuinely difficult to argue about. Katie’s love for Neeley over Francie gives the group something uncomfortable to sit with. The ending places Francie on the fire escape watching a new little girl in her old spot, giving the group something to interpret rather than accept.

The novel also rewards rereaders. Details that seem atmospheric on a first read (the coffee Francie pours down the drain, the tin-can bank, the Christmas tree competition) reveal themselves on a second read as Smith’s most precise arguments. Book club discussions tend to surface those details naturally.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club Questions: Characters and Relationships

Katie Nolan knows on her wedding day that marrying Johnny will mean slaving for him. She chooses him anyway. Smith writes: “Maybe that decision was her great mistake.” Did Katie make a mistake? What does her choice reveal about the nature of romantic love and its costs?
Katie admits to herself that she loves Neeley more than Francie. She knows this, she cannot help it, and she does not act on it unfairly. She does not change it either. How does the group respond to this admission? Does Smith expect readers to judge Katie for it?
Johnny Nolan is charming, loving, and completely unreliable. His family adores him and he lets them down repeatedly. Francie loves him more than she loves her competent, hardworking mother. What does Smith argue through Francie’s preference? Does the novel share that preference, or does it quietly correct it?
Aunt Sissy has been married three times, has lost ten babies, and approaches life with a warmth and recklessness that her family finds simultaneously exhausting and essential. Smith describes her as “healthily hungry” about men, in contrast to Flossie Gaddis, who is “starved.” What does Smith mean by that distinction? What does Sissy represent in the novel that the other women cannot?
Mary Rommely cannot read or write her own name, yet Smith presents her as the wisest figure in the novel. She understands sin, grief, cruelty, and human weakness without having read a word about any of them. What does Smith argue through Mary about the limits of formal education? Does the novel bear that argument out?
Ben Blake plans his entire life in a straight line: law school, country practice, state legislature, governor. Everyone around him believes he will do exactly what he plans. Francie likes him enormously but cannot love him. Why not? What does Smith argue through Ben about the difference between admiration and love?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club Questions: Poverty, Class, and Education

Francie pours her coffee down the drain every day despite having almost nothing. Her mother defends the practice as giving the children “the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money.” What does this ritual argue about dignity, poverty, and the psychology of survival? Does the group find it admirable, heartbreaking, or both?
Katie concludes on the Christmas Eve fire escape that education, not money, separates people like Miss Jackson from people like Mrs. McGarrity. The McGarritys have money. Miss Jackson does not. Yet Miss Jackson has something the McGarritys lack entirely. Does the novel make a convincing case for education as the key variable? What does it leave out?
Francie transfers to a better school in a better neighborhood on her own initiative, lying about her address to do it. The new school treats her completely differently from her old one. What does Smith argue through this comparison about the relationship between a child’s address and her chances? How much has this changed in the century since the novel takes place?
The Nolan family’s tin-can bank represents both a survival strategy and a ritual of hope. Half of everything, always. The money disappears repeatedly into emergencies, yet the habit persists. What does Smith argue about hope and financial discipline among the working poor? Does the tin-can bank represent wisdom, futility, or both?
Francie becomes the fastest reader at the press clipping bureau but the lowest paid. She never finds out how underpaid she is because her isolation keeps her outside the networks where that information travels. What does Smith argue about the relationship between social belonging and economic survival?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club Questions: Gender, Women, and Survival

Smith writes of the Rommely women: “They were made out of thin invisible steel.” Every Rommely woman bears a man who fails her in some way: Thomas Rommely, Johnny Nolan, Willie Flittman. Each survives him. What does the novel argue about the specific kind of strength required of women in this world? Does that argument still hold?
When the sex predator corners Francie in the hallway, she freezes completely. Katie shoots the man without hesitation, throws the gun in the washtub, and goes to her daughter. What does this scene reveal about the difference between Francie and Katie at this stage of their lives? What does it cost each of them?
Katie explains sex to Francie plainly, using whatever words she has, because no one ever told Katie what she needed to know. Smith calls Francie “luckier than most children of the neighborhood” because of this conversation. What does the novel argue about the specific duty mothers owe daughters? Does the group agree?
Francie’s composition teacher tells her that her stories are “morbid,” too full of poverty and drunkenness, and orders her to write about “nice things.” The novel the group just read is essentially the story that teacher told Francie not to write. What does Smith say through this irony about who gets to decide what stories deserve telling?
By the end of the novel, Francie stands before a mirror in her slip, getting ready for a date, while a little girl watches her from a fire escape across the yard. Francie once watched the big girls across the way in the same way. She calls out “Hello, Francie.” The child corrects her. What does Smith argue through this final image about cycles, change, and what actually passes from one generation to the next?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club Questions: The Novel as a Whole

The Tree of Heaven grows in Francie’s yard, gets cut down, then grows again from the stump along the ground until it finds open sky and turns upward. Smith gives Francie the same structure: cut back repeatedly, always finding a new direction. Does this parallel feel earned by the end of the novel, or does it feel like an imposition of meaning onto a more complicated story?
Smith uses a fragmented, almost scrapbook structure for much of the novel: diary entries, neighborhood vignettes, backstory chapters, present-day scenes. How does this structure serve the story? What would a more conventional chronological narrative lose?
Johnny Nolan dies offstage, already weakened, already fading. Smith does not give him a dramatic death scene. What does this choice argue about Johnny’s place in the novel’s moral universe? Does he deserve more?
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn appeared in 1943, during World War II, to enormous popular success. Smith wrote about 1912 Brooklyn from memory and imagination. What does the novel’s timing tell us about why it resonated so powerfully? What did 1943 readers need from this story?
The novel spans roughly five years of Francie’s life, from age eleven to sixteen and a half, but reaches back two generations to give context. By the final chapter, Francie prepares to leave Brooklyn for the University of Michigan. Does the group feel that Francie has actually escaped? What does she carry with her that she may not yet know she carries?

Using These A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book Club Questions

Ten to twelve questions works well for a two-hour discussion. Pick questions from each section to give the conversation range across character, theme, and craft. The questions in the “Characters and Relationships” section tend to generate the most immediate disagreement. The “Novel as a Whole” section works best toward the end of the meeting, after the group has warmed up on more specific material.

For book clubs that want a reading accountability tool before discussion, the A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Reading Test covers the full novel with 25 multiple choice questions and short and extended response prompts.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN Book Club Questions: 21 Discussion Prompts