BROOKLYN

Author: Colm Tóibín

The protagonist of the book is a girl named Eilis Lacey, who lives in a town in southern Ireland, Enniscorthy, with her mother, who is a widow, and her older sister, since her brothers have gone in search of work .

Eilis is a clever girl, with accounting studies but she does not find work in her village, she only works in a grocery store on Sundays in the morning.

One day they receive the visit of a priest friend of the family, Father Flood, who tells them that he comes from New York and there probably he would find work for Eilis in New York.

Her mother and  Rose think that it is good for Eilis to go to New York, a few days later Eilis bought the ship’s ticket to New York.

The trip is very long and hard. In New York she meets Father Flood who helps her to find a job and a sleeping-house in the Brooklyn neighborhood. Eilis works in a department stores as a shop assistant  and lives in Ms. Madge Kehoe house with other girls.

She decides to go to accounting classes at night so that she will be able to find a better job, she gets a lots of letters from her mother and her sister and she feels increasingly homeless at her house, but gradually she gets accustomed to the daily life of Brooklyn.

Sometimes she sees Father Flood whom she helps with the meals that he organizes for the poor. She also begins to go to the neighborhood dance on Friday night with the girls in the guest house.

On a Friday afternoon, she meets Tony, an Italian-American boy, who is a plumber, he also has to work to help his parents and brothers. Eilis and Tony fall in love, Tony introduces Eilis to his parents, everything seems to go well, but one day Eilis arrives home and finds Flood who brings bad news, he tells her that her sister Rose had died while he slept because of the heart. Now she had to return to Ireland next to her mother.

Eilis tells Tony that she will return to Brooklyn but Tony is afraid that this does not happen and he proposes that they get married so she will return, she accepts and they get married in secret before leaving to Ireland.

At home with her mother everything is sad, she does not tell anyone that she is married. Eilis easily gets accostumed to his old life in the village, she  begins to walk and go to the beach with his old friends. Like this, she begins a new friendship with Jim and increasingly thinks less about Tony.

I really like Brooklyn, it teaches us how difficult it is to emigrate and start a new life alone, far from the family and usually with little money.

I would recommend it a lot, I could not stop reading it, as it makes you think about what Eilis can finally decide.

Montse Bosch

4th English

August is a special boy but not a boy with special needs as he says. He is ten years old and he has a particularity on his face that does not allow to be like the other boys. He was born with a facial deformity, a bizarre illness named genetic disorder characterized by craniofacial malformations.

He lives like a normal boy, playing in the playgrounds, watching Star Wars films, enjoying with his dog and all those stuff that  children  usually do. However, due to this illness, he has been studying at home, overprotected by his parents. But this year, he will start to go at school like the other children.

In the beginning, he feels out of place, although he starts to meet new friends, some of them more sincere and honest than other ones. But all of them  are finding out about the good and sweet August’s bottom, a simple child that just wants to be normal and that with his naturalness and his good sense of humor even joking about himself, he is winning little by little to all his school companions.

In my opinion, it is a very good book. It is a book that makes you think about some important things in your life like friendship, tenderness, sincerity, optimism and effort.

I would absolutely  recommend it.

Abigail Jené Teixidó – 4th Anglès