Book Club: Brooklyn

Blurb: It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

A colleague recommended Brooklyn by Colm Toibin and I was immediately pretty pleased with it when it arrived in the post - the cover was great (I'm a sucker for shiny things...) and it was really very short (only 250 pages).

As a read, however, I was quite confused by my feelings towards it. On the one hand I didn't find myself all that gripped for a lot of it; there wasn't a lot of excitement or extreme drama and it felt, in general, quite flat. I guess I was expecting what so often happens in these kind of books - girl has high expectations for a world she knows nothing about, heads over and finds it dramatically worse than what she started with. This wasn't like that at all, though, really. I don't mean it was plain sailing but it wasn't a Bond book - and neither should it have been!

That brings me onto my other thought about the book. While it was quite 'flat' and not full of events etc. the result was that it felt like a very 'real' portrayal of the time period. As a social history, it was strong. It was a snapshot of real life at that time. There wasn't an unrealistic commentary about all the iconography of the time - old-fashioned taxis, different clothing, etc - it was all told through the eyes of someone to whom all these things wouldn't have been 'normal'.

It was a very easy read - Colm Toibin doesn't over-complicated things - and as a friend of mine in the book club said, it almost felt like too easy a read, like we were cheating somehow.

All in all, I would say it was appreciated but not entirely 'loved' and the consensus was that that was all because of the successful way in which Toibin tries to make it seem realistic and believable.

I would say that by the end of the book I did feel affection for the protagonist and the decisions that she has to make.

We all rated it, as usual, and it conveniently averaged out to the rating I originally gave it: 6.5