Foster by Claire Keegan

In a world where you want to read more but can’t find the time, remember the mighty novella. These slim stories can be just as profound, moving, and satisfying as regular-sized novels. Foster, by Claire Keegan, weighs in at less than 100 pages but it has subtle depth and power. Definitely worth your time and won’t take up too much of it.

This is a sad-but-uplifting story about overlapping lives and people doing the best they can, the best they know how. It’s about children caught in the middle, at the mercy of their parents.

Foster tells the tale of a young Irish girl sent to live with mother’s relatives for the summer. She comes from a large family with another child on the way and is shipped off, seemingly to give her parents a break until the baby is born.

The girl is never named which works to highlight her tenuous situation, straddling two homes and two lives. She’s introspective, curious, observant, and trusting. I loved the parts where her inner thoughts and dialog were the focus. She thinks on things and then “concludes” this or that, and it just made me smile every time.

The girl’s foster family, John and Edna Kinsella, are kind but strange. They settle into a routine of housework, gardening, milking cows and fetching water from the well. But something’s off and the first clue comes when John decides it’s well past time to go into town to get the child some new clothes; since she arrived she’s been using things from the closet in her room, never considering who once wore them.

Keegan’s writing softly shines throughout Foster. It’s spare but descriptive and full of emotion using as few words possible. During the trip to town a nosy neighbor tells the truth about the Kinsellas (apparently nosy neighbors are the same no matter where you live.) To the girl, she’s “another woman with eyes like picks.”

In a tender moment John takes the girl’s hand and she realizes her own father had never done the same. And as much as she wants to hang on, she also wants to let go so she won’t feel her feelings about her two lives. Then she leans into it and begins “to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.”

A little while later he tells her something I’ve claimed as a lesson to be remembered:

You don’t have to say anything. Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Ireland is beautifully depicted in Foster, all wind and sea and landscape. Some of it reminded me of Tana French’s The Searcher which has similarly gorgeous descriptions of what must be one of the most hauntingly beautiful places on the planet.

Speaking of hauntingly beautiful, the last three pages of this book are something intense and exquisite. I want you to read Foster so you’ll know the context behind this –

My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands…

Foster was published in 2010 but the English translation came 12 years later in 2022. Lucky us! And lucky children in Ireland – the author’s bio states that this is now part of the school curriculum there. I hope you seek out this little gem, it’s entertaining and enriching, a rare combination.

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Want more novellas? Here’s a link to three reviews https://bookthrasher.com/tag/novellas/