Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Colm Tóibín

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance

288 pages, published September 8, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis (pronounced eye-liss) Lacey, a young woman who travels from a small town in Ireland to Brooklyn, New York in the years following World War II.  Eilis leaves behind her mother and her beloved sister Rose (her brothers had already left for England after their father died) when she is sponsored by an Irish priest from Brooklyn to live in the United States.  We follow Eilis as she makes her way in a transatlantic crossing on a ocean liner, lives in a boarding house with other young women, gets a job in a department store, takes accounting classes and falls in love with Tony, a sweet boy from a big Italian family.  When Eilis must return to Ireland in response to a family crisis, she is forced to choose between her comfortable life over there and her new, challenging life in America.

Quotes 

“What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling.”

 

“She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.”

 

“Carefully, she went back up the stairs and found that if she moved along the first landing she would be able to see him from above. Somehow, she thought, if she could look at him, take him in clearly when he was not trying to amuse her or impress her, something would come to her, some knowledge, or some ability to make a decision.”

 

“She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.”

 

“Some people are nice and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”

 

“We keep our prices low and our manners high.”

 

“What she loved most about America, Eilis thought on these mornings, was how the heating was kept on all night.”

 

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,’ her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.”

My Take

At the beginning of 2016, I saw the movie version of Brooklyn and was enchanted by the simple, sweet tale of a young Irish woman who must choose between a new, challenging life in the United States and her life in Ireland which was comfortable, but with less opportunity and adventure.  After finishing the book, I can report that it is just as good as the movie.  Sometimes, a simple story that is well told can be the satisfying read.  That was the case here and I recommend you check out both the book and movie.