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 TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY... June 3, 2007
Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The author of the classic, bestselling coming of age story, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", will delight her fans with this book, which is evocative of lower middle class life in Brooklyn. While this book may not have the poignancy of her classic bestseller, it will, nonetheless, hold the interest of her fans. It is a story of dashed hopes and dreams, as well as that of bitter disillusionment from which the well-spring of hope arises, like a phoenix out of the ashes.
Margy Shannon grew up in the early part of the twentieth century, living a hand-to-mouth, hardscrabble existence in Brooklyn with her mother and father. Her parents, living embittered and estranged lives under the same roof, made Margy want to grow up and live happily ever after with the man of her dreams and with children of her own whom she would treat better than the way her own unhappy mother treated her.
When Margy was seventeen, she left school to work as a mail reader for a mail order firm, as she was expected to contribute financially to her parents' household. Margy enjoyed her job and very much liked her boss, Mr. Prentiss, with whom she felt a connection. She also developed camaraderie and friendships with the other girls with whom she worked. Life was finally getting good for Margy, and then she met Frankie Malone.
Frankie Malone was a guy from the neighborhood, an ambitious young man from a rough-and-tumble Irish family, upon whom Margy had a crush. Through happenstance, they began dating. When he asked her to marry him, Margy thought she had died and gone to heaven. Little did she know that she was on the path to a living hell.
Margy had seen marriage as a beginning to a new and wonderful life. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues that were unexpected and would serve to throw a bit of a monkey wrench into her plans. Margy's and Frankie's respective families loathed each other, adding tension to their relationship. What loomed larger in their marriage, however, was Frankie's avoidance of physical contact. In fact, his sexual orientation seemed ambiguous and his desires, ambivalent, causing Margy no end of consternation.
Moreover, Frankie was also reluctant to have children. Still, Margy was determined to make her marriage, such as it was, work. When she finally got pregnant, Frankie's reaction to her having his baby began the sounding of the death knell of their marriage. When tragedy struck, the bonds of that marriage began fully unraveling, making Margy realize that the life she had envisioned was simply a fairytale and that she had to make some tough decisions, if she was to have a better tomorrow.
Another classic from Betty Smith April 5, 2005
Joan C. Frank (Silver Spring, MD USA)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
There is something about the way Betty Smith writes that just pulls me deep into her life. I say "her life" because we are getting slices of her life in each of her novels. {"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "Joy in the Morning" are the most directly autobiographical.} Even though her prose are direct and her stories are deceptively simple, I cannot put her books down. I am there with her characters, inside their lives as they are living them.
Like in "Angela's Ashes," the Irish/American impoverished desperation and the raw immediacy of young life are stark and vivid in "Tomorrow will be Better." Parents who never had a chance to develop emotional and physical resources themselves, are brutal toward their children. The children have not lost hope for a better life, but they see people who have given up all around them. As a prejudiced on-looker, I am driven to hope that they get the opportunity to be loved and loving and rise above their parents' frightening existence.
This is just as riveting as the rest of her books. I only wish that there were more!
 Second best of Smith's four novels October 3, 2004
Scaramouche (Redlands, CA United States)
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
Of Betty Smith's four novels, "Tomorrow Will Be Better" is second-best only to "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" ("Joy in the Morning" and "Maggie-Now" ranking third and fourth).
It took Smith two decades and four books to finally give one of her main female characters a decent, normal husband, in "Joy in the Morning." In her first three novels, husbands are either losers or freaks. In "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," Francie's father (her mother's first husband) is a drunk loser. In "Maggie-Now," Maggie's father is an insufferable jerk and her husband is a weirdo slacker who charms with his looks and charisma but tortures Maggie with his asinine "free spirit" lifestyle. But wait till you get a load of Margy's husband in "Tomorrow Will Be Better." This guy is a real piece of work. Confused as to his sexual orientation, unable to make any emotional commitment, he gives most of his attention to his job and his mother while his wife lies in a dreary slum clinic having a miscarriage.
Since so much of Smith's fiction is drawn from her own experience, the suffering most of her women characters go through at the hands of their egregious husbands makes one wonder what her first marriage was like.
Except for a couple of digressions into the life stories of peripheral characters, "Tomorrow Will Be Better" is strongly written and, like "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," vividly evokes the lives of the Irish lower class in early-twentieth-century New York.
If you've read the other three books, expect many of the same elements here: an adorable female protagonist; bitter, poor, semi-educated Irish one or two generations above the shanty; baby birthing; and of course (with the exception of Carl in "Joy in the Morning") a husband you'd like to beat with a baseball bat and rescue the heroine from.
Toward the end, the story sinks into despair and even its final tiny offer of hope--the remote possibility of Margy's escape from her dead marriage to a new relationship with a rather dull adult mama's boy--would be pitiful except that in comparison to the moribund union she's stuck in it would be a step upward.
The Forgotten Masterpiece June 13, 2003
Allyn (USA)
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
In 1920's Brooklyn, Margie graduates from highschool and is filled with youthful optimism. Determined to rise above the drudgery and poverty of her upbringing, Margie finds a job at a small business nearby and attempts to escape her overbearing mother and her overworked,disillusioned father. Before long, she meets Frankie Malone, a poor Brooklynite like herself, and the two fall headlong into courtship and marriage. Despite differences between her and Frankie, and some difficulties in her relationship with her parents, Margie still hopes that "tomorrow will be better."Perhaps more than many of her other books, "Tomorrow Will Be Better" showcases Betty Smith's boundless abilities. Although the synopsis of this book may sound unassuming and dull, with Smith's writing the story becomes rich and eye-opening. Never have I found another author who can take an ordinary life and an ordinary situation (such as Margie's) and fill it with such truth and wisdom so that it becomes powerful. Smith has a rare gift for truly putting herself "in her characters' shoes" and seamlessly weaving their differing stories together to form a believable novel. While "Tomorrow Will Be Better" is ultimately a sad story, its sadness is fitting, realistic, and handled extremely will. This story of optimism, dreams, and disillusionment may not be quite the show-stopping masterpiece that "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" is, yet it deserves to be read for its excellent characterization and deep truth.
wonderful in its own right January 24, 2002
Saima Huq (Washington, DC)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This book is often compared to Smith's opus "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" and thus many readers miss what is truly great about this book. Whereas "Brooklyn" chronicles Francie's growth within her family from child to woman while weaving in the perspective of her mother, father, aunts, etc., "Tomorrow" is purely about Margie."Tomorrow" begins with 16-year-old Margie getting her first job in Brooklyn. It chronicles her courtship and marriage to Frankie, a neighborhood boy with his own family issues i.e. overbearing mother, loud father, myriad sisters. Margie's own parents are none too attentive to their daughter and what she might need, but feel pangs of loss when she decides to get married. Margie tries to please her mother, mother-in-law, and husband, make ends meet, gets pregnant, and gradually all of these adult conventions that she is supposed to want threaten to destroy her unless she stands up to all of them. Only then will she truly be an adult. This is an excellent account of a girl becoming a woman and proving it is an internal, not external, journey. The tale is as true today as it was in the 1940s. Female readers will identify with many of the sentiments expressed in this book and find themselves comparing their own lives to it.
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