Brooklyn: A Novel

I enjoyed the story but did not like the ending what so ever. It felt too rushed and did not give me the closure that I was looking for.

A quiet but effective description of how love often slips into and out of a young woman's life. Beautiful, but not terribly romantic.

It started out interesting enough, but I found myself getting more and more aggravated with the main character. She was just letting poeple make decisions for her and seemed to not be taking any responsibility for her own life. The whole story felt rushed. There were so many interesting characters that could have been explored and expanded on but they just came and went with no additional information about them.

I was very disappointed in the ending too. I thought I had missed something, but no it just ends. I love stories about Ireland and Irish immigrants but this was very disppointing.

A fast read, and I did find myself wanting to know how Eilis' story would turn out. But the book fell short for me in a couple ways. First, the style, though refreshingly direct, was nearly all "telling." She thought, she wondered, she decided, she felt and felt and felt. Yes, it's a legitimate style, but left me sleepy. Second, so many plot threads turned out to be rabbit trails; I thought there would be more to the story. I did enjoy this enough to try another of Toibin's books.

The story had me hooked from the beginning. I felt the book started off great and liked the characters and how the story was progressing. The biggest flaw, and what spoiled this book for me was the awkward intimacy and romance that Colm Toibin tried to pass off as endearing. The book did not redeem itself from the awkwardness of the romance scenes, which was very disappointing because the book held so much promise at the start of the book.

Doors opened and closed, sunlight and shade, yesterdays and tomorrows; these are all motifs that come to mind as I consider the beauty of Colm Toibin's poignant novel, Brooklyn. Brooklyn is the tomorrow when the novel begins and almost becomes the yesterday that is forgotten as Toibin shares the story of Eilis Lacey in his own unsensational way. From the start the importance of her family permeates the book as seen in the simple opening sentence: "Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work." (p 3)Her sister, Rose, along with her mother are important in Eilis's young life as she experiences the opening and closing of doors. The way Eilis who appears almost stoic at times, yet is full of emotional turmoil inside, handles the major changes in her life is both touching and endearing. I often tell a close friend that I do not love (or hate) a character in a book, but I grew to love Eilis as her character matured. For this is also an Irish-American bildungsroman with Eilis, encouraged by her sister, growing and learning and maturing into a woman who must face some difficult decisions.Colm Toibin tells this story through the accumulation of small moments that gradually cohere to form a novel that deals with profound questions of love and life and death. He is at his best when he describes how difficult it is for Eilis to communicate her innermost desires with those closest to her. His abililty to describe the impact of both memories on the moment and the being of the other resonated with my own experience. Meditating on her family that she left in Ireland she muses: "they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them" (p 73)The otherness of Eilis that permeates the novel arises not only from the isolation of an Irish girl in Brooklyn, but also from the tensions that develop as she tries to develop her own identity as a woman and face the choices she must make as one. It is in these choices, the lyrical beauty of Toibin's prose, and the impression that you are left with - a feeling that you have shared a part of the life of this young woman from Ireland - that make this a meaningful novel.