Quick Take
- Narration: Kate Burton inhabits Francie Nolan’s Brooklyn world with a warm naturalism that honors the novel’s specific social texture, the Irish immigrant vernacular, the children’s street rhythms, and Johnny Nolan’s sentimental bluster all feel distinct.
- Themes: Coming-of-age in poverty, the hunger for education and self-determination, family loyalty and its costs
- Mood: Bittersweet and luminous, the particular feeling of a childhood that is both hard and loved
- Verdict: One of the great American coming-of-age novels gains real intimacy in audio, Burton’s narration makes the Williamsburg tenement world feel lived-in rather than historical.
I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I was about twelve, out of a secondhand copy with a broken spine that my grandmother had kept since the 1970s. That version of the book lives in my memory as something warm and slightly worn, like a garment that had been worn by someone before me. Listening to Kate Burton read it is a different kind of encounter, more formal, more consciously crafted, but carrying its own form of intimacy. Burton is the daughter of Richard Burton, and she brings to this material a theatrical instinct that is properly restrained for a novel this domestic in scale.
Betty Smith published this novel in 1943, and it stands as a nearly perfect record of a very specific time and place: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the years around 1910-1919, seen through the eyes of Francie Nolan, who is born into a family with more love and more chaos than money or stability. Her father Johnny is a singing waiter, charming and unreliable in equal measure, whose relationship with alcohol shapes the family’s entire economic and emotional life. Her mother Katie is the family’s spine, pragmatic, occasionally harsh, determined that her children will have more than she did. Francie is the observer, the reader, the one who sits in the tree outside the window and watches the neighborhood with the focused attention of someone who understands, even as a child, that she is witnessing something that will not last.
The Junk Day Economy and Why Small Details Matter
One of Smith’s great gifts as a novelist is her precision about the economics of poverty. The Saturday junk day ritual, when Francie and her brother Neeley trade their week’s worth of collected paper, rags, and metal for pennies, is described with an exactness that makes it feel documented rather than invented. The specific calculations of the Nolan household budget, the cost of a loaf of bread versus a piece of candy, the decision to spend money on a Christmas tree rather than food, these are not background details. They are the substance of the novel’s emotional logic.
In audio, this specificity works well. Burton reads the economic passages with the same weight she brings to the emotional ones, resisting any impulse to skim them as mere period color. A reviewer who describes the novel as offering “a rich experience” is right, but the richness is precisely in these accumulations of small, precise observation. The PBS Great American Read designation is well earned. This is not nostalgia, it is record-keeping by a writer who knew the world she was describing from the inside.
Johnny Nolan and the Question of Alcoholism in Audio
One of the novel’s most complicated achievements is its portrait of Johnny Nolan. He is a failure by almost any conventional measure: he can’t hold a job, he drinks his family’s resources away, he dies before his children are grown. And yet Smith makes him genuinely loveable without excusing him, a balance that requires the reader to hold two irreconcilable truths simultaneously. Burton’s narration is careful with this. She voices Johnny with a warmth that acknowledges his charm without sentimentalizing his failures, and she voices Francie’s love for him with the unselfconscious absoluteness of a child who doesn’t yet have the vocabulary for ambivalence.
The Aunt Sissy subplot, her serial marriages without the formality of divorce, runs through the novel as a kind of counterpoint to the main family story, and Burton handles the comedy of Sissy’s situation without losing sight of the real social precariousness it represents. This is a novel that is aware of its women’s constrained choices even when it is laughing about them.
Kate Burton’s Performance Across Fifteen Hours
At just under fifteen hours, this is a substantial listen. Burton sustains it without fatigue or variation in quality, which is the essential requirement for a novel this long and this intimate. The Williamsburg vernacular, the children’s street talk, the immigrant community’s particular idiom, is handled naturally rather than as a performed accent, which is the correct choice. The novel’s most famous passages, including Francie’s first reading experiences and her relationship with the local library, benefit from the audio format in specific ways: hearing the language described as magical, when you are already listening to language, creates a productive resonance.
One reviewer mentioned problems with a Kindle version’s text quality. The audiobook has no such issue. Burton’s recording is clean, consistent, and produced with evident care for Smith’s prose rhythms.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Anyone who has never encountered this novel should listen to it, the audiobook is arguably the best way to access it now, when the pace of early twentieth-century domestic realism can feel slow to readers acclimated to contemporary fiction’s pacing. Burton makes every chapter worth staying with. Listeners who want plot-driven narrative momentum may find Smith’s episodic structure frustrating, this is a novel built of scenes rather than suspense, and it earns its length through accumulation rather than acceleration. Those who appreciate American literary realism, working-class fiction, or coming-of-age narratives written with genuine social consciousness will find this among the genre’s enduring examples.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the novel’s historical setting, Brooklyn in the 1910s, handled in a way that feels accessible to contemporary listeners, or does it require background knowledge?
It’s fully accessible without prior knowledge of the period. Smith writes with novelistic specificity rather than historical explanation, and Burton’s narration keeps the social context clear through character and action rather than exposition. The Williamsburg tenement world is detailed enough that listeners without any background in early twentieth-century immigrant New York will feel oriented within the first hour.
Is Kate Burton’s narration consistent throughout the nearly fifteen-hour runtime?
Yes, impressively so. She maintains both the vocal distinctions between characters and the tonal register of the novel, its balance between melancholy and warmth, without variation across the full length. Long novels can expose narrators who rush in later chapters, and Burton doesn’t. This is a carefully executed performance.
The novel is classified under Education on this platform. What is its relationship to education as a theme?
Education is one of the novel’s central preoccupations. Francie’s relationship with reading, her determination to attend school despite her circumstances, and the specific scenes in which access to books becomes a measure of dignity and aspiration are among the novel’s most remembered passages. It is a coming-of-age story in which the hunger for knowledge is the protagonist’s defining characteristic.
Does the audiobook include any supplementary material, such as an author note or historical context?
The audiobook edition does not include supplementary scholarly material. It is a straight reading of Smith’s novel. Listeners who want historical context about Williamsburg in the early twentieth century, or background on Smith’s own life and its relationship to the Nolan family’s story, would need to seek that separately.
