Looking through your family photos, you see your mom looking so young and cheerful next to your dad, who’s holding you as a baby. You look so healthy and happy then, so inexperienced and gullible. You see yourself grow up, getting closer to being an adult, but still having so much more to learn. What if that wasn’t how you had grown up? What if these amazing people never knew you and never were there to support you? Life is a long, confusing and rough journey, filled with happiness and pain. You learn from your mistakes, and do your best whenever possible. As a kid you are inexperienced and get away with things just because you are so innocent, and when you are an adult you are wiser, and can’t just slip by things any more.
This book had a theme, and that was going from innocence to experience. In the beginning of the book, Francie was eleven years and was living in the harsh streets of Brooklyn, New York. She was very shy and unimpeacable, and didn’t really fit in due to the way she acted. Most of the other kids were loud and obnoxious while Francie was quiet and smart about her actions. She was a little smarter and wiser than the other kids, but she still had a long way to go before she was a grown adult with a lot of experience. As the years went by, Francie learned things from her family, such as how to cook or take care of kids from her mother. Betty Smith wrote this book to show this girls journey from innocence to experience, to show that it isn’t easy to get through it, but when you have a supportive family it’s a little easier.
Everyone goes through hard times, some more than others. Francie goes through plenty, but learns how to deal with it. Johnny, Francie’s dad, dies in the middle of the book. Her family still manages to get by, at times very imperceptibly, and at other times very smoothly. All of Johnny’s brothers, and himself died before the age of thirty-five, and grew, “handsomer, weaker and beguiling with each generation.” Francie also has to survive a time in her life when there is little food and even littler amount of money. In the twenty-first century, many people are unemployed and don’t live like the rich and famous, just like how the Nolan’s are living during Francie’s childhood. In the end, everything turns out fine, you either get a good paying job or learn to live with what you have.
As you close the heavy, dusty photo album, you think about the good and bad times of your childhood. Getting stickers on your essay and going home to show mom and dad, or getting your picture in the newspaper. Or the times when you were unable to go and play tag or soccer with your friends due to your inappropriate actions, and sitting in the corner full of regret. Growing up can be fun, growing up can be tough, and everyday you learn something new. By the time you are grown up and working, you have learned not to talk back to your parents or pick a fight with the biggest kid on the block, all from past experience. Going from a child, who is as innocent as can be, to an adult knows what to do and when to do it, is a rough journey, and in this novel, Betty Smith shows a young girl becoming a woman and starting to make her own decisions instead of having others do it for her.
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