Brooklyn: A Novel

Brooklyn: A Novel
by Colm Toibin

Brooklyn: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Colm Toibin
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-05
ISBN: 1439138311
Number of pages: 262
Publisher: Scribner
Product features:

Book Reviews of Brooklyn: A Novel

Book Review: What a disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars

I had been excited to read this book, based on the glowing reviews it received in the NY Times & elsewhere. After finishing it, I was really disappointed. While the writing is excellent, I was dismayed by the extraordinarily limited perspectives of the main character. I understand her lack of sophistication, based on her upbringing in a tiny rural village, but I can't fathom her lack of curiosity or empathy for anyone in her new world. Though the author is much celebrated, it was curious that he appeared to give his main character neither an inner life nor much in the way of a value system.

Summary of Brooklyn: A Novel

Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm T?ib?n's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

By far T?ib?n's most instantly engaging and emotionally resonant novel, Brooklyn will make readers fall in love with his gorgeous writing and spellbinding characters.


Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Committed to a quiet life in little Enniscorthy, Ireland, the industrious young Eilis Lacey reluctantly finds herself swept up in an unplanned adventure to America, engineered by the family priest and her glamorous, "ready for life" sister, Rose. Eilis's determination to embrace the spirit of the journey despite her trepidation--especially on behalf of Rose, who has sacrificed her own chance of leaving--makes a bittersweet center for Brooklyn. Colm T?ib?n's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth. Readers will find themselves swept across the Atlantic with Eilis to a boarding house in Brooklyn where she painstakingly adapts to a new life, reinventing herself and her surroundings in the letters she writes home. Just as she begins to settle in with the help of a new love, tragedy calls her home to Enniscorthy, and her separate lives suddenly and painfully merge into one. T?ib?n's haunted heroine glows on the page, unforgettably and lovingly rendered, and her story reflects the lives of so many others exiled from home. --Daphne Durham

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