A Tree Grows In Brooklyn Analysis

Katie Nolan, Francie’s mother, is the main reason that Francie is able to survive her arduous childhood and succeed in life. Food, heat and protection are always available to the Nolan children even if it means that Katie has to work multiple jobs or even sacrifice some of her own needs. Katie gives all she can to provide for her children and Francie truly values her mother’s hard work. Francie appreciates her mother’s thougtful acts, but still, Francie develops

Parenting styles differ from family to family, but most good parents have a common goal of teaching their children to be honest, kind, trustworthy, and to never give up. Most parent’s ideas for being a good parent is making sure that your child grows up in a loving environment in which she or he can learn about how to be a good person. Betty Smiths novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she depicts a young girl known as Francie growing up in somewhat corrupt home life. The main contribution to her corrupt house is her father Johnny. In the tree grows in Brooklyn Johnny has the appearance of a golden apple on the outside, but a personality of a rotten apple on the inside.

Jeannette listened to her parents, of course, as a child you feel dependent on them. They would often only spend months at one tons only to move to the next when the family’s father, Rex Wells, lost his job. Little Jeannette was left alone with her brother, who was only a year younger than her, they would go looking for trouble as young kids would. Their parents would allow them to do what they felt they wanted as long as they were home by the time the street lights came on. Her parents taught their children to not be dependent on them for everything, to learn harder schooling, and learn to be strong when the world seems to stop. All of these are great things to teach but the way the children

The Bean Trees Essay Benjamin Franklin once said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” Everyone would like to think that growth is something achievable by anyone, but sometimes growth may be restricted due to gender. Gender, an arguable concept which determines your identity, goes hand in hand with growth, a progressive development that is essential for humans. Without growth, we are burdened physically and mentally. Gender can affect your growth in many ways in which even being a female can restrict one from achieving improvement.

Change has always been an important part of our lives. Whether the change is physical or emotional, all humans undergo on this phenomenon. Some change is for the better, while some is for the worse. The Bean Trees, a novel beautifully crafted by author Barbara Kingsolver, delineates a young woman’s struggle to avoid the inevitable. Over the course of the novel, the protagonist, Taylor Greer, undergoes many hardships and life-changing experiences. With support from her family and friends, Taylor begins to embraces motherhood and transforms from an inexperienced vagabond into an undaunted young woman.

The tragic events of Francine Cournos memoir begins when she was three years old when she lost her father from cerebral hemorrhage. For some children this would be enough to permanently damage the psyche of a child, but when Francine was five she lost her grandfather to hemorrhaging and then when she eleven she also lost her mother after a long battle with breast cancer. This forced her sister and her to live with their grandmother, who was rapidly approaching senility. Francine and her sister, Alexis, being under their grandmothers care lasted until she couldn 't manage it anymore, which was about two years. Afterwards their extended family gave away both of them to the sometimes vicious foster care system. To Francine this was the most traumatic event of them all and

Another role Frannie had was being a mother. She had a ten-year-old son, named Robert. Frannie was a devoted mother. She would try to shield her son from the abuse she was experiencing at home. Every time she would have bruises on her body she would tell Robert that she had been in an accident so that he would not fear his father. Frannie states, “I told my

Francie Nolan is an 11-year-old girl with a vivid imagination and dreams of someday becoming an author. However, she is limited by her surroundings, for she lives in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Her family has barely enough money to buy food and other necessities of life. Her mother is Katie Nolan, a strong, steely woman who meets every challenge that comes her way head-first, and her father is Johnny Nolan, an idealistic father whom Francie loves very much, but is an alcoholic. Francie is sure that Katie loves her brother, Neeley, more than herself, and she attaches herself to her father.

She has always felt a responsibility to take care of her siblings, earn money to help with finances, and control her father when he was drunk, even taking him home from the bar. Jeannette would try to bring food home for her siblings when she found any extra. At one point she says, “I felt like I was failing Maureen, like I wasn’t keeping my promise that I’d protect her.” (206) In reality, Jeannette should not be the one in charge of protecting her siblings and making sure they have enough food and necessities but she does because her parents don’t. She also feels the need to make extra money because her parents don’t have steady incomes. By the age of thirteen, she was the head of the household for the summer and had a job that paid forty dollars a week. (209, 215) She was making more money than either of her parents and she wasn’t even old enough by law to have a job. Another example of her maturity beyond her age is when Rose Mary makes Jeannette retrieve her father from the bar when he doesn’t come home after a couple of days. (181) This a job that Rose Mary should be doing herself but instead she sends Jeannette so she doesn’t have to deal with

Native Americans are known for living in harmony with the land, animals, and other people in the world. In “The Education on Little Tree”, Forrest Carter illustrates the Cherokee respect and love for nature through the experiences of a young boy. The Education of Little Tree is a story of a boy who was orphaned and then adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression. Little Tree is shown how to respect nature in the Cherokee Way, taking only what is needed and leaving the rest for nature to run its course. The author vividly describes how the Cherokee live with the land, and had a respect for and a love of nature.

Julia’s character develops mentally and physically throughout chapters 12-21 of the novel The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. In these chapters we see Julia begin to mature a lot more. She begins to be more aware of her surrounding and relationships with others, as well as changes going on in her personal life such as her body and how she feels about herself. Julia’s relationship with her father is negatively effected when she discovers his big secret he had been keeping for a while. One day, as she peeps through Sylvia’s window she notices her with a man.

“She would suffer all the rest of her life every time that she remembered that she had not smiled back,” (234). This sentence, written by Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is in reference to when protagonist, Francie Nolan, had not allowed herself to smile back at a seemingly bad girl named Joanna because she thought she was not meant to be friendly with people like her. What struck me the most about the instance Francie says she will suffer all her life, is the almost immediate guilty feeling that Francie portrays after she saw Joanna being taunted later on. Francie seems to think that in that particular moment, not smiling back at Joanna was one of the worst things she could have

Like a gallant redwood tree, You swayed and shook Through a storm brutal and cold And you dug your roots deeper than before. A myriad of times you fought The battles meant for me.

When Francie is eleven years old, Neeley and she collect junk (such as metal and paper) for money. On the way to the junk shop, Francie, her brother, Neeley, and the children like them are being called the “Rag Pickers” by taunters who are also the rag pickers. Neeley does not care what other people call him or how dirty and filthy he is as long as he could make money. Francie, however, is ashamed of the name, and she despises being called the rag pickers. Francie would not accept that she is inferior to others just because she is poor. Francie has a high standard and pride for herself, which is why she hates to be poor. Once, when Francie is getting vaccinated, the doctor calls her filthy and people like her have no right to live. Francie is stung by the words, and she knows that her brother can get hurt if he hears them. So, Francie prevents the doctor from repeating the same words to his brother and others. This resistance shows that Francie not only cares about herself, but she also cares about other people’s feelings, especially her

Upon watching the YouTube video, “Park Avenue: money, power and the American dream - Why Poverty?” I began to see some connections between what we have been learning in English 205 and the video I was watching. What the video shows is a group of ultra-rich white men that use their money and politics to keep themselves rich and to keep the rest of us down. They also use their power to advance their political agendas. How did these men get and maintain their money? Some of the men shown in the video come from a long history of money, while some of them made money on their own though dealings on Wall Street. I believe one of the speakers said something about hedge fund managers. You might ask, “But what do these men all have in common?”