2.5 Stars I'm sorry to say BROOKLYN was a disappointing read for me.It was slow going throughout most of the story with a kind of monotone dialogue, and while I did find Eilis's initial trip from Ireland to America kind of fun and interesting, her life while in America was day-after-day of repetitive boredom for the reader. (at least for me)As for Eilis herself, at first I thought she showed strength of character and heart, but by the end of the story, well.....I admit to hoping for her demise!

Well...it was a quick read...I expected far more and only in minute passage did I find it. Mr. Toibin's BROOKLYN felt rushed, a bit glossed over, too formulaic for me to honestly believe the character of Eilis Lacey (and the name bothered me as much as her lack of substance). There were small moments of brilliance: the terse passages of what was not said, which was the most telling, yet those glimmers were rare. I could not identify in the least with Eilis, she was so one-dimensional, barely the...

"Ordinary things, that she would never know, that would not matter to her now."“Brooklyn” is a beautiful, simple book. It reminds me of the writing of Anton Chekov, just life happening. And in the hands of a skilled writer, that is enough to keep you reading. The novel moves quickly, although it covers a span of two years it is only 262 pages. Things happen, big things, without any fanfare, as they do for all of us, every day in real life.The novel’s protagonist, Ellis Lacey, is so fully rendere...

[Edited 12/19/21]Assuming we have a reliable narrator, we can date this story by the newly-released movie she views - Singing in the Rain - so it’s 1952.A young Irish woman emigrates to Brooklyn. Back in Ireland, she has three brothers all working in England, as well as an older sister who will now stay home to take care of their aging mother. The older sister, who happens to be more attractive, athletic and ambitious, sacrifices her possibility of a normal married life for her younger sister. O...

Some books are worth sticking with. To call this book a slow starter would be to evoke a drastic understatement. After around a hundred or so pages, I was beginning to wonder if this book was actually going anywhere. There was a completer lack of plot, as the mundane life of an ordinary girl unfolded in all its blandness. However, as the novel progressed it built up momentum, ever so slowly until the point where it became a heart racing crescendo of uncertainty. The true shame of this book,

Although I vacilated between sympathizing with the main character and wondering at her thought processes, in the end, I was disappointed in her behavior, choices and the ending of this book.

Zoe Heller said Brooklyn was the most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman she has read in a long time and though I’d give that accolade to the narrator of A Girl is a Half Formed Thing there is much that’s moving and compelling in this novel. In fact it’s hard to fault except perhaps to say that it’s composed on a small canvas and so lacks the breadth of a truly thrilling and first rate novel. Basically it’s a concise and artful study of the sensibility of a young girl who suddenly f...

It's hard to read anything about books without hearing gushing praise for Brooklyn, so I settled in for a brilliant work about immigration and America and New York and alienation and crushing hard work and etc. Brooklyn, though, is no The Jungle or Call It Sleep. Set partially in 1950-ish Ireland and partly in Brooklyn, the novel follows spineless and benign Eilis through her voyage to the United States (arranged by her sister and a kind priest), where she receives a job, is enrolled some classe...

Brooklyn is a wonderful character portrait and captures as well the struggle of an Irish immigrant to the US in the post war world. Eilis Lacy is a twenty-something in a small Irish town, frustrated at the sclerotic nature of her environment. Her life lies ahead of her in a single, entirely predictable line and she feels suffocated. She wants to study, to learn accountancy, or at least bookkeeping, so she can rise a little above her lowly economic situation. Seizing an unexpected opportunity, sh...

A simple but universal coming-of-age story, beautifully and gracefully toldUsually I read the book before seeing the movie, but in this case I saw the movie first. I screened the lovely film back in August when I wrote a cover story on Brooklyn’s star, Saoirse Ronan, for my paper’s coverage of the Toronto Film Festival. I only now caught up with the novel. I’m so glad I did. It really made me appreciate Nick Hornby’s adaptation. In 1950s small town Ireland, Eilis Lacey has few prospects in life;...

A lovely Bank Holiday read for St Patrick's weekend and a book where the past comes to life through fiction and yet for many Irish Immigrants this story paints a vivid picture of life in small towns in rural Ireland in the 50s and 60s, the ties to family and the pull of what is familiar and the duty we feel towards family. I think this book means a lot to me on a personal level as it is very silimiar to my aunt's story and therefore as real as it gets for an immigrant's account and my aunt who

When I finished this novel I felt as if I had just been uprooted. Something was tearing inside me. No, don’t think it was because the novel mesmerized me. It was something else. Strange.The first half of the novel was an amiable read, calm. Toibin’s clear and relaxed writing and bittersweet story opened horizons. The story of a young woman, in the nineteen fifties, who has no other prospect in her small town in Ireland but to find, almost desperately, a suitable husband, emigrates alone, to the

I was hugely dissapointed in this book. Amazon.com reviewer "Flibertigibbit" says it best, so I am just going to quote her here:Brooklyn is flat and dull. This, incidentally, has little to do with Toibin's famously economical prose style - which I love. The principal problem is with characterisation. The characters are cardboard cut-out, lacking in complexity, unrealised and utterly unconvincing. The central character is so passive that it is scarcely believable and she simply can not sustain my...

Thinking again about this lovely book, nearly seven years after I first read it, how it has stayed with me, how Tóibín has moved and influenced me as a reader and a writer. Original Review, posted June 7, 2009This gentle, quietly resonant novel showed me a new side of Colm Tóibín's writing. At first blush it seems a simple coming-of-age story of a young Irish immigrant alone in New York. But Tóibín, though he writes with affection, keeps enough distance from his characters to allow his reader to...