Discussion Guides That Actually Work For Classic Fiction
Most book club question lists you find online are copy-pasted garbage. You can tell because they always open with "What do you think about..." and then loop through the same three themes for twelve questions. It doesn't take long for the conversation to flatline. I've run enough reading groups over the years to know that good questions don't come from a template. They come from actually sitting with the book, noticing the edges where people might push back, and preparing to follow up when someone gives a vague answer. "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith is one of those books where the surface reading is pleasant and sentimental, but the stuff underneath is where people get interesting. The Francie/Nellie relationship. The class dynamics that are more complicated than the book lets on. The way Kelly's drinking is both romanticized and condemned simultaneously. Those are the seams worth pulling at.
Club Questions For A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Here's what I use when I'm running a group discussion. These aren't decorative. Each one is aimed at a specific friction point in the text. Start with the opening. The book begins with a poem about the tree growing in Brooklyn. Ask people what that tree represents to Francie. Then ask them whether the ending recontextualizes that symbol or just confirms it. You'll get two camps immediately. That's useful. The mother-daughter dynamic is the spine of this novel, but most groups fixate on Francie without looking hard enough at Nellie. Ask what kind of parenting Nellie is actually practicing. She's chaotic, sometimes neglectful, occasionally cruel, but she also survives. Is that survival something she passes to Francie? Or does Francie escape it? This is where the conversation gets honest.
Kelly deserves more scrutiny. He's presented as a charismatic father figure who occasionally vanishes into drinking binges that ruin Christmas. Some readers treat his alcoholism as a tragic flaw. Others miss how the narrative itself wavers on whether it's a flaw at all. Ask the group whether the book is sympathetic to Kelly's addiction or simply uses it as backstory for Francie's resilience. The answer reveals a lot about how the reader interprets suffering. Class mobility is the explicit theme of the book, but the mechanics of it are worth examining. Francie works. She studies. She gets a scholarship to high school. But the book never really asks whether education is actually liberation or just a different kind of performance. Have people trace the moments where Francie's ambition outpaces her environment. Then ask what price that ambition extracts from her relationships. The Catholicism in this novel is ambient. It's not theological. It's cultural architecture. Ask whether religion functions as comfort or control for the characters. Then push further. Ask whether Francie's eventual intellectual independence includes shedding religious frameworks or simply rearranging them.
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Sexuality in this book is treated with the caution of 1943 but carries more charge than it lets on. Francie's encounters with boys happen at the margins of the narrative. The ones people remember are the ones that don't go anywhere. Discuss whether the book is shy about sexuality because of its era or because Francie herself is. There's a difference. The ending has a reputation. Some readers find it earned. Others find it tidy. Ask what "growing" actually means in the final pages. Is it hope? Is it resignation? Is it just the narrative convention of finishing a coming-of-age story on a forward note? Let the group argue about this one. It almost always does. One practical tip from experience: assign the book in two parts if your group is casual readers. The first half moves differently than the second half. The middle sags. People lose thread. Stopping before the high school sequence and resuming after gives the conversation air. It also gives people time to realize they're thinking about something before the next meeting.
Another thing nobody mentions. The dialect can alienate new readers in the first fifty pages. It's not heavy, but it's persistent. Don't skip over that initial friction. Ask people who struggled with the voice what exactly made it difficult. Sometimes that resistance tells you more about the group's reading habits than anything else in the discussion. If you want a more complete set of questions organized by chapter, there are study guides available through standard educational publishers and the official companion sites. Most are free. Some are worth paying for. The decent ones include contextual notes about 1910s Brooklyn that most readers skip but that actually matter when you're trying to understand why certain choices feel constrained rather than personal.
