![]() 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. Tóibín 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. ![]() ![]() But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tóibín’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). ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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