I just finished reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 'cause, you know, I'm all about the Blyn. (I never read it when I was younger.) My bf warned me "it's dark" and it sure is, but there are a lot of interesting observations about how this group of desperately poor people right about a hundred years ago saw the world. Two of my favorite lines, "The difference was that Flossie Gaddis was starved about men and Sissy was healthily hungry about them. And what a difference that made." And the penetrating but seldom-expressed truth of, "Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things."

The kids in the book often say, as we did when I was a kid, something you don't hear much any more, "It's a free country."