Crossing into Brooklyn by Mary Ann McGuigan

 To Find Your Future, You Have to Face Your Past

At sixteen, Morgan Lindstrum has the life that every other girl wants--at least from the outside. A privileged only child, she has everything she could ever want, except her parents' attention. A Princeton physicist and a high-powered executive, they barely have any time for each other, much less for Morgan. Then her beloved grandfather dies, depriving Morgan of the only stable figure in her life. If that's not enough, she suddenly finds out he was never her grandfather at all. To find out the truth about her family, Morgan makes her way to Brooklyn, where she meets Terence Mulvaney, the Irish immigrant father who her mother disowned. Morgan wants answers; but instead of just satisfying her curiosity, Mulvaney shows her the people in his condemned tenement building, who are suffering and have nowhere to go. He challenges her to help them, by tearing away the veil of shame, and showing her wealthy parents and her advantaged circle of friends a world they don't want to know exists. The temptation to walk away from this ugly reality, as her mother did, is strong. But if she does, can Morgan ever really leave behind what she learned when she crossed into Brooklyn?

 I had mixed feelings with this book. I loved how close Morgan was to most of her family and how she was trying to find answers as to why her mother didn't want her to meet her real grandfather. On the other hand, I thought it was kind of confusing and weird how her mother wouldn't really talk about her real family and how she wouldn't let her daughter meet her father.

I was completely wrong about what this book was about. I thought it might have some romance, and maybe some relationship drama. Instead I got a girl trying to meet her grandfather and her lying to almost everyone in her life- her mother about going to see her grandfather, her crush/boyfriend about having been with other people before... Morgan started to really annoy me and I continually wished that she would just come clean with EVERYTHING. There was WAAAYYYY to much drama.

I would have been fine with this book being about a girl meeting her grandfather and getting to know him. I actually would have loved to read a book like that but it seemed like the author kept adding more plot lines into it and just got in over her head. This made the plot jumbled and confusing and it just didn't work very well for me. I also feel not all the loose ends were tied up at the end and I really hated the ending. It seemed like the author just sort of gave up on wanting the characters to be happy and sort of gave them all really depressing futures. I don't want to give out spoilers so that's all I will say but it just seemed like a non-memorable ending that I know for a fact I will not remember a month from now. For most books a year from the day that I read them the only thing I will remember about the book is how the characters ended up. With this book I'm not sure I'll even remember anything about it. I might be happy rereading it though, especially to see if I like it more the second time around.

Overall, I might recommend this. I'm really not sure. It was an average book for me but you might like it more, or you might not like it all so much. All I can say is it really depends on your personal preferences and that if the synopsis sounds good to you then you should really try it out!

***I received this book from the publisher via a giveaway on Goodreads. A huge thank you goes out!***

Thanks for reading!
~Bri