Books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend follows Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, two girls growing up in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of 1950s Naples. Their friendship, which is equal parts love and competition, drives them through childhood, adolescence, and beyond as they respond to poverty, violence, and limited options in radically different ways.

Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel treats education as both an escape route and a source of painful distance from the people and places that formed you. Ferrante writes about the texture of working-class Italian life with the same specificity that Smith brings to her Brooklyn tenements, and both authors understand that poverty is not just an absence of money but a web of relationships, habits, and unspoken rules.

Elena, like Francie, is a keen observer who uses reading and study to build a bridge to a wider world, and both girls carry the weight of knowing that their success sets them apart from their families. The novel is the first of four and builds a story of extraordinary scope.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Scout Finch, a girl growing up in Depression-era Alabama where racial injustice and small-town dynamics shape daily life. Like Francie, Scout is an observant child whose narration captures the gap between what adults say and what they do, and both girls learn difficult truths about their communities through experience rather than instruction.

Lee writes about poverty, dignity, and moral courage with the same directness that Smith brings to the Nolan family's struggles, and both novels feature fathers who are deeply flawed but deeply loved. Atticus Finch and Johnny Nolan could not be more different in their failings, but both are rendered with compassion that refuses to simplify them into heroes or villains.

The novels share a conviction that childhood perception, because it has not yet learned to filter or rationalize, can cut through adult pretensions to reach something true. Both books have become staples of American literature precisely because they capture the experience of growing up with honesty and emotional precision.

Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain follows a young boy in 1980s Glasgow who remains fiercely devoted to his mother Agnes as she battles alcoholism amid the collapse of Scotland's industrial economy. Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel depicts a child navigating poverty with intelligence and love, watching a parent destroyed by addiction while still seeing the person underneath the disease.

Stuart writes about economic deprivation with the same unflinching detail that Smith uses: the specific humiliations of having the wrong clothes, the wrong address, the wrong family. Both novels also celebrate the stubborn persistence of children who refuse to stop caring about beauty, cleanliness, and dignity even when their circumstances make those things nearly impossible to maintain.

Shuggie's Glasgow and Francie's Brooklyn are separated by decades and an ocean, but the emotional landscape is remarkably similar. Stuart won the Booker Prize for this debut, and the novel stands as a worthy companion to Smith's classic in its treatment of childhood resilience and the complicated love between children and their imperfect parents.

Markus Zusak's The Book Thief takes place in Nazi Germany and follows Liesel Meminger, a young girl who steals books from Nazi bonfires and learns to read with the help of her foster father. Narrated by Death, the novel shares A Tree Grows in Brooklyn's conviction that books and literacy can provide salvation in the darkest circumstances. Liesel, like Francie, discovers that reading opens doors to worlds beyond her immediate suffering, and both girls build their identities around the written word.

Zusak writes about wartime Germany with sensitivity and dark humor, creating a world where kindness and cruelty exist side by side in the same street, the same family, the same person. Smith creates a similar moral complexity in her Brooklyn, where generosity and cruelty coexist in the tenements. Both novels are fundamentally stories about the power of stories themselves, and both treat their young protagonists as full human beings whose perspectives on the world deserve serious attention.

The Book Thief is more overtly poetic than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but both books trust that young readers can handle difficult truths.

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women follows the four March sisters through adolescence and young adulthood during and after the Civil War, as they navigate poverty, ambition, love, and loss in their small Massachusetts home. Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel treats a family's daily struggles with respect and attention, finding drama in the question of how to make ends meet and meaning in the bonds between mothers and daughters.

Jo March shares Francie Nolan's literary ambitions and restless energy, and both characters use writing as a way to process their experiences and reach beyond the lives their circumstances seem to have assigned them. Alcott writes about poverty with a frankness unusual for her era, and the March family's determination to maintain their dignity and generosity despite financial strain mirrors the Nolans' fierce pride.

Both novels span years, tracking their heroines from girlhood through the compromises and revelations of early adulthood, and both end with a sense of earned wisdom rather than easy triumph.

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner follows Amir, a boy from a privileged family in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of his father's servant, as their friendship is torn apart by an act of cowardice and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the novel is a coming-of-age story that uses a specific city and era to address universal themes of loyalty, guilt, and the weight of family expectations.

Hosseini writes about Kabul with the same loving detail that Smith brings to Brooklyn, creating a neighborhood populated by vendors, kite fighters, and storytellers that feels as real as any place a reader could visit. Both novels depict childhoods shaped by forces the protagonists cannot control, and both trace how early experiences leave marks that persist into adulthood.

The shift from Amir's childhood in Afghanistan to his adult life in California mirrors Francie's movement between the Brooklyn of her youth and the wider world she enters through education. Both books insist that where you come from stays with you, whether you want it to or not.

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar follows Esther Greenwood, a scholarship student from a modest Massachusetts background who wins a summer internship at a New York fashion magazine and begins to unravel under the pressure of choosing who to become. Like Francie, Esther is a bright young woman for whom education represents both opportunity and a painful awareness of how far she stands from the world she is trying to enter.

Plath writes about the gap between ambition and reality with a sharp, dark wit that Smith would recognize, and both authors understand that the transition from childhood to adulthood is not a smooth arc but a series of shocks. The Bell Jar deals more directly with mental illness than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but both novels share an interest in how intelligent women navigate systems that were not designed for them.

Esther's observations about 1950s New York carry the same mix of wonder and disillusionment that colors Francie's view of her changing Brooklyn, and both books remain essential portraits of young American women fighting to define themselves on their own terms.