Looking for Home in Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

I didn't buy Colm Toibin's Brooklyn because it was on the Newsweek list. I didn't buy it because others were speaking of it, though that always helps. I bought it because Toibin can be a transporting writer, and I needed to be taken somewhere.

Brooklyn took me somewhere. Oh, it did. It's a straightforward-seeming story that is anything but—a chronologically clear progression that hardly dawdles for flashbacks, that doesn't go in for psychowonder, that doesn't delight itself with literary pyro