It always feels good to read a classic. I have wanted to read this book for a while, so my month to pick the book club book seemed like the perfect opportunity. It is kind of like The Seinfeld Show - a book about nothing. Nothing spectacular happens. It's just the story of a girl who isn't very well off who just struggles and continues to make it in life. There is a tree that grows near her house - one tree amidst all the cement. The tree survives and thrives despite people neglecting it, abusing it, even trying to ruin it.....just like Francie and her family always survive.
I really liked that the mother is a strong character in this story, as is Francie. I loved that they realized that the way out of their struggled was through learning and through reading.
There are some strange characters in the book. Francie's dad is a lovable, handsome and fun guy - but never much of a provider for the family. His mother had three sons. Two died and one got married - which was about as good as dying to her. She was kind of bizarre:
Johnny, Francie's dad, is an interesting sort. He's a drunk who makes his money singing. He never really did want a family, but he does stick around mostly. His mother had all boys and had a hard time not having them around. When Johnny and his wife announced they were having a baby she wailed, "Now she's got you good. You'll never be able to come back to me."
Odd. Sort of. Some mothers have a hard time letting go of their boys.
I loved all the talk of school and learning and reading.
Katie deeply wants her children to have a better life than hers. On her mother's advice, she reads to them every day from Shakespeare and from The Bible. It does make a difference in Francie's life - although not always positive. Sometimes it causes her to be too different from her friends.
Francie finds a school she wants to go to instead of the one in the district where she lives. She and her dad conjure up a "white lie" so she can attend that school.
"It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable." (chapter 23, p. 176)
One chapter that really struck me was when Francie decides that she will never have female friends. This decision is thanks to a bunch of women who taunt and shun and make fun of a girl who has a baby out of wedlock. Francie even shuns this girl by looking at her cold-faced when she smiles at her. However, when the women inadvertently injure the baby by throwing rocks at the mother, Francie is horrified.
p. 237 (chapter 30) Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had cared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna's brush. The passing man had been the only one who spoke with kindness in his voice.
Most of the women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman....whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.
Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them.
Francie opened the copybook which she used for a diary. She skipped a line under the paragraph that she had written about intolerance and wrote:
"As long as I live, I will never have a woman for a friend. I will never trust any woman again, except maybe Mama and sometimes Aunt Evy and Aunt Sissy."
And she never did.
There's something magical about this book. I think anyone could read it and find themselves in it. It's a story where women stand up for themselves. It's a story where extended family sticks together. It's a story where despite the odds, they do slowly get ahead. There are no quick fixes. There is a lot of heart ache, hard work, patience and going without along the way.
It's definitely a book I'd recommend!
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