Brooklyn

Brooklyn 

By: Colm Tóibín 

Synopsis: Brooklyn is about an Irish girl named Eilis Lacey who leaves her family behind when she immigrated to Brooklyn from a small-town Ireland a couple of years after World War 2. Eilis gets a job and she starts to struggle with her new life in America, and to distract her from her homesickness she enrolls in college. Then she unexpectedly falls in love with an Italian man named Tony. Just as she's adjusting to her new life, she receives devastating news from Ireland and she must make some very hard decisions. 

Review: Brooklyn is an amazing book. It's very well written and has a great story line. It's full of emotion and shows the reader what it would be like to live during that time. It makes interesting comparisons between Irish and American culture. Tóibín also makes amazing, unique characters. All of them are different in at least 5 ways and that's nice to have when reading these types of historical-fiction books. Occasionally it became a little hard to read, but it's probably because I saw the movie before I read it. The movie was great but the book was obviously better. It's just when I know what's going to happen in a book it takes me longer to read it. But if I hadn't seen the movie first I would've read this book in a week. Overall it was great, and wonderfully written. (Also a Major Motion Picture.)