APRIL 2009 - AudioFile
An exceptionally subdued novel, BROOKLYN is enhanced by the velvety voice of Kirsten Potter, whose narration is skilled and personable. The quiet progress of protagonist Eilis as she journeys from small-town Ireland to postwar Brooklyn is enlivened by Potter's effortless delivery of accents and personalities. Various characters move through Brooklyn's streets and Eilis's life, and Potter is at the ready with distinct voices for each one. With its simple prose and plot, the story of Eilis's time in her new country might be overlooked without Potter's talents, which draw listeners in and keep them engaged. Potter takes an understated story and makes it well worth a listen. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
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Reviewed by Maureen Howard
Colm Tóibín's engaging new novel, Brooklyn, will not bring to mind the fashionable borough of recent years nor Bed-Stuy beleaguered with the troubles of a Saturday night. Tóibín has revived the Brooklyn of an Irish-Catholic parish in the '50s, a setting appropriate to the narrow life of Eilis Lacey. Before Eilis ships out for a decent job in America, her village life is sketched in detail. The shops, pub, the hoity-toity and plainspoken people of Enniscorthy have such appeal on the page, it does seem a shame to leave. But how will we share the girl's longing for home, if home is not a gabby presence in her émigré tale? Tóibín's maneuvers draw us to the bright girl with a gift for numbers. With a keen eye, Eilis surveys her lonely, steady-on life: her job in the dry goods store, the rules and regulations of her rooming house-ladies only. The competitive hustle at the parish dances are so like the ones back home-it's something of a wonder I did not give up on the gentle tattle of her story, run a Netflix of the feline power struggle in Claire Booth Luce's The Women. Tóibín rescues his homesick shopgirl from narrow concerns, gives her a stop-by at Brooklyn College, a night course in commercial law. Her instructor is Joshua Rosenblum. Buying his book, the shopkeeper informs her, "At least we did that, we got Rosenblum out."
"You mean in the war?"
His reply when she asks again: "In the holocaust, in the churben."
The scene is eerie, falsely naïve. We may accept what a village girl from Ireland,which remained neutral during the war, may not have known, but Tóibín's delivery of the racial and ethnic discoveries of a clueless young woman are disconcerting. Eilis wonders if she should write home about the Jews, the Poles, the Italians she encounters, but shouldn't the novelist in pursuing those postwar years in Brooklyn, in the Irish enclave of the generous Father Flood, take the mike? The Irish vets I knew when I came to New York in the early '50s had been to that war; at least two I raised a glass with at the White Horse were from Brooklyn. When the stage is set for the love story, slowly and carefully as befits his serious girl, Tóibín is splendidly in control of Eilis's and Tony's courtship. He's Italian, you see, of a poor, caring family. I wanted to cast Brooklyn, with Rosalind Russell perfect for Rose, the sporty elder sister left to her career in Ireland. Can we get Philip Seymour Hoffman into that cassock again? J. Carol Naish, he played homeboy Italian, not the mob. I give away nothing in telling that the possibility of Eilis reclaiming an authentic and spirited life in Ireland turns Brooklyn into a stirring and satisfying moral tale. Tóibín, author of The Master, a fine-tuned novel on the lonely last years of Henry James, revisits, diminuendo, the wrenching finale of The Portrait of a Lady. What the future holds for Eilis in America is nothing like Isabel Archer's return to the morally corrupt Osmond. The decent fellow awaits. Will she be doomed to a tract house of the soul on Long Island? I hear John McCormick take the high note-alone in the gloaming with the shadows of the past-as Tóibín's good girl contemplates the lost promise of Brooklyn.
Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, the last season of her quartet of novels based on the four seasons, will be published by Viking in October.
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Library Journal
This latest work from Tóibín (www.colmtoibin.com), which follows The Master Mothers and Sons (2006), also available from Blackstone Audio, takes place in the early 1950s and centers on Eilis Lacey, who leaves her hometown of Enniscorthy, Ireland, for Brooklyn, NY, in search of work and a new life. Narrator Kirsten Potter's (www.kirstenpotter.com) smooth voice and affinity for accents pull listeners along through the often plodding narrative. A lightweight work of literary fiction from IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Tóibín that will appeal to fans of the McCourt brothers and those interested in Irish American history or 1950s Brooklyn. [The Scribner hc was called "more accessible and more sublime than [Tóibín's] previous works" and was "highly recommended," LJ 3/15/09.—Ed.]—Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL
Kirkus Reviews
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid. T-ib'n's treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest's sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. T-ib'n fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel's final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn's roiling motley populace, and at the women's boarding house where she's virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis's own dour and scattered one. T-ib'n is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis's first sexual experience with Tony (whom she'll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she mustfully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis's future (literally) again and again. A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of T-ib'n's ever-increasing skills and range. Author tour to Boston, New York, Princeton, N.J., San Francisco
From the Publisher
Praise for Brooklyn
“Written with mesmerizing power and skill.” —Richard Eder, Boston Globe
“Colm Tóibín ... [is] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.” —Floyd Skoot, Los Angeles Times
“Tóibín creates suspense out of the simplest emotions: fear, love and, most poignantly, regret.” —Time
“Eilis' universal struggles with matters of the heart ... make this novel ... a moving, deeply satisfying read.” —Entertainment Weekly
“[A] gem of a novel... profound.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Quietly majestic.” —Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books
“[A] masterly tale... There is not a sentence or a thought out of place.... His finest fiction to date.” —Bernard O’Donoghue, Irish Times
"[A] triumph... One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations." —USA Today
USA Today
"[A] triumph… One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations."
Pam Houston
A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound… There are no antagonists in this novel, no psychodramas, no angst. There is only the sound of a young woman slowly and deliberately stepping into herself, learning to make and stand behind her choices, finding herself.
The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)
Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect…. Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.
Los Angeles Times Floyd Skoot
Tóibín … [is] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.