Eilis Lacey of Enniscorthy, Ireland thought that she could live in her small town all her life, get married and have children just like her mother did. But her older, more spirited sister Rose has other ideas for her. Plans are finalized when Father Flood arrives from Brooklyn promising to sponsor Eilis and makes arrangements for her at a boarding house in New York. After a dreadful sea journey, Eilis, hardly twenty years old, appears in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.
Brooklyn: A Novel by Colm Toibin is an intimate, reflective, and evocative struggle of a young woman’s desire for independence. When Eilis receives letters from home, the pall of an overwhelming homesickness descends on her. “All this came to her like a terrible weight and she felt for a second that she was going to cry. It was as though an ache in her chest was trying to force down tears down her cheeks despite her enormous effort to keep them back.” Eilis learns to be resourceful and lands a job in a store, takes accounting and bookkeeping classes at night, and meets Tony, an Italian plumber, who falls madly in love with her. Just as she is slowly shedding some of the old country ways and reluctantly embracing American life, terrible news pulls her back home to Enniscorthy.
Within weeks of being home, Jim Farrell proposes to Eilis. Should she stay home, be with her Mom and marry Jim, or should she return to Brooklyn, Tony, and a new life without the encumbrances of the past?
Toibin’s mastery shows in the respectful and elegant way that he unfolds this otherwise simple story and make us care for Eilis and the people in her life. It is a book of restrained passion, the act of coming to the brink and pulling back to look at the situation in a different paradigm. The story resonates with me and made me realize that home is not just the place where you were born or where you grew up, but a place where your heart truly is.
A 2010 Adult Summer Reading Club recommendation