A Scathing Review (to a Book I Gave 3 Stars)

So why trash a book I gave a 3 star Goodreads review to?  Well, I didn't HATE the book.  In fact, it was very well written, and I didn't put it down, finishing it in two days by reading every spare moment I had.  But I've had a lot of thoughts swirling in my head about this book that I didn't put into my official Goodreads review, and I've decided to share them here:

I finished reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith recently, and it took me a couple of days to get the toxic leftover feelings out of my head.  It's interesting because I'd seen a couple Goodreads reviews of the book from friends of mine and no one warned, "Watch out!  This book will really bring you down!" If I ever needed more proof that different people can have completely opposite experiences reading the same material, this was it.

It wasn't a bad book.  It most certainly wasn't a poorly written book.  If it had been, I wouldn't have lived it so well and it wouldn't have had such a negative effect on me.  But seriously, book blurb people, who finds this book inspiring?  How?  Because *mild spoilers ahead* Francie manages to work hard and get the education she so desperately wants?  Because her mother was lucky enough to remarry "up" and give Francie the opportunity to go to college?

There's this sense throughout the whole book that life is full of grinding poverty, meanness, loveless marriages, and brutal unpleasant sex (unless you're unmarried and it's your first love and he's a total cad who would leave you in the lurch in a heartbeat but he's your first love and it will never be the same afterwards).  There's some lip service paid to the idea of finding beauty even in the most hardscrabble existence (hence the tree that can manage to grow in Brooklyn-- although having lived in both Brooklyn and in Arizona, I'm not impressed.  Trees in Brooklyn are lush and green and more plentiful than you might believe compared to the prickly scrub bushes out here that we call trees).  However, there's precious little happiness in this book and barely a smidgen of joy at all.  The biggest hole for me was the sense of anything that really mattered.  What's the point of all these people's lives?  Why go on struggling?  What hope is there really for the future?  Even if things change, what does it matter?

Obviously, other people didn't have a hard time with this like I did, but I even struggled with Francie's implied happy ending, only because I knew this novel was Smith's take on "how her life should have gone while still being starkly realistic" and I knew that Smith's marriage with the guy from Brooklyn that she followed to college didn't end well.  So I guess I tacked on my own imaginary ending with "Francie goes away to college, marries the aspiring politician, has a couple of kids, and ends up divorced and scrabbling to support her two kids on her own while daydreaming of the loser who romanced her for a couple days before marrying someone else."  Yeah, depressing, and not what was really in the story, but hey, like I said, I wasn't inspired even to struggle harder through adversity through this book.  I finished instead with a great ringing relief that I'm not trying to raise a family in Brooklyn, and being eternally grateful that I wasn't born in the early 1900's.

Well, it would be a great research book for someone wondering what life would have been like in the tenements of Brooklyn around the WWI era.  But for entertainment purposes?  Only if your taste in fiction is markedly different than mine.  Which it might be.