Friday, March 18, 2016

Book 17- "Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin

So, I am working on "Gone with the Wind" (which is quite the undertaking) but I had this checked out and I saw that someone else wants it so I had to finish it before it was due. It is a book that a recent movie was based on, that was nominated for a few awards.
Eilis Lacey is a girl from Ireland. She lives with her mother and her sister Rose, and has been struggling to find work. Her dad has passed away, and her three brothers all moved to England to work. Eilis has struggled to find a job, and finally gets one that is far beneath her skill set. A priest comes and talks to her, saying he is from Brooklyn and that she should move there to have a better life. Her family helps her decide that she needs to go, and she sails across the ocean. She lives with a landlady and five other tenants, but struggles to find friends. She has a job, and enrolls in night classes to work on her bookkeeping so that she can become an accountant. She meets and falls in love with an Italian boy named Tony, and they were almost ready to get married when she finds out her sister died suddenly. She decides that she needs to go home to see her mother, and Tony says that he wants to marry her before she leaves so that she will come back. (First of all, kind of manipulative, right?) Then she goes back to Ireland and gets set up with a guy. As her time in Ireland runs short HE wants to marry her, so she is caught in a quandary. Does she go back to Brooklyn with her Italian husband, or does she stay with this other man that she has been spending time with?
So, I liked about 3/4 of this book. Until she cheated on her husband. I was already wondering what she was going to decide with going to Brooklyn or not, but it left a bad taste in my mouth that she was so spineless that she couldn't tell someone that she didn't even know that she had a boyfriend back in America, let alone that she was married. It would have been so easy.
So overall, a decent book. Besides that.

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