Recommendations
Books Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Best books to read after A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn insists that the specific texture of poverty — its smells and rituals and accidental beauties — is as worthy of literary attention as any more privileged life. These 8 books share its eye for the poetry of working-class childhood, its complicated family love, and its faith that aspiration can grow in unpromising conditions.
- 1Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's 2005 memoir about growing up with nomadic and neglectful parents in the American Southwest and Appalachia is the closest contemporary parallel to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: the same complicated father-daughter love (for a charming man who cannot provide), the same specific texture of childhood poverty, and the same retrospective understanding that the impoverished childhood was nevertheless a real one.
- 2Buy
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 memoir about growing up in poverty in Limerick, Ireland — with a charming alcoholic father whose inability to keep the family fed kills two of his children — is the closest cultural parallel to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Irish Catholic immigrant family, alcoholic father, fiercely practical mother, and a child who escapes through reading and ambition.
- 3Buy
Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
For readers interested in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a novel about the sustaining power of art and aspiration in difficult circumstances, Patchett's 2001 novel — in which a hostage crisis in a Latin American country is transformed by the presence of a great soprano — explores the same theme through very different material: the way music and beauty can create temporary human community across every line of division.
- 4Buy
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
Alvarez's 1991 debut about four Dominican sisters navigating immigration and identity shares A Tree Grows in Brooklyn's portrait of an immigrant family working out who they are in America, and its affectionate specificity about the details of the particular culture — Dominican rather than Irish Catholic, but with the same love for the family's particular idiom and ritual.
- 5Buy
The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
Cisneros's 1984 novel-in-vignettes about Esperanza Cordero growing up in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Chicago is the Chicana companion to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: a girl growing up in poverty in a specific ethnic neighborhood, wanting more than the life around her, finding her aspiration in language and story.
- 6Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Westover's 2018 memoir about teaching herself to a Cambridge PhD from a survivalist Idaho childhood shares A Tree Grows in Brooklyn's central aspiration: a girl with limited access to formal education who refuses to let that limit define her, and who uses every resource available — libraries, books, her own fierce intelligence — to get out.
- 7Buy
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Tan's 1989 debut novel — following four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters, the clash of cultures and expectations across generations — shares A Tree Grows in Brooklyn's portrait of immigrant family life and its specific attention to the gap between the world the mothers hoped to leave and the world the daughters are inheriting.
- 8Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about formerly enslaved people after the Civil War is the most serious American novel about what it means for a community to persist in the aftermath of systematic destruction — the tree of heaven grows in Brooklyn because it can grow anywhere; Morrison asks what happens when the tree's roots are in ground soaked with suffering.
More A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.