Foster

I bought this on impulse in a bookstore in Wexford, Ireland. It’s a spare wee book without a wasted word. After I finished reading it, I don’t think I moved for an hour; I just let it ripple through me.

Because her mother is once again pregnant and life is too much for her parents, a young girl is sent away for the summer to live with her mother’s cousin and her husband, who recently lost a son. Afforded attention and care, she blossoms in teeny, tiny, heartbreaking ways.

This is a writer who believes in the intelligence of her… show more.

This book is not a memoir per se, but it reads like a memoir.

Such a short book, but so packed with emotion and beautiful writing, as the protagonist attempts to find her place in the world. Although our family situations couldn’t have been more different in terms of the countries in which we grew up, and our family structure, I deeply identified with the protagonist’s feeling that she didn’t belong, wasn’t really part of the family situation in which she found herself. I read it months ago and it has remained with me.

This story is so full and moving; the characters linger long after you finish.

The story takes place in rural Ireland, where a young girl is sent to stay with relatives, the Kinsellas, a couple whom she has never met. With nuanced, delicate prose, the child narrates her experience as she unexpectedly finds love and joy with the Kinsellas.

She also discovers the couple are grieving the loss of their own child. They become the parents she wishes she had. When I reached the end, as Edna Kinsella, the wife, says, “If you were mine, I’d never leave you in… show more.

I heard so many plaudits about Claire Keegan’s Foster, and the critics are right. Sparely written and replete with unspoken secrets—despite the foster mother’s stern warning that there are no secrets in the house—this heartbreaking novella held me rapt from beginning to end.

In rural Ireland, a father takes his young daughter to stay with relatives on a farm while her mother gives birth to yet another child. Far from being traumatized, the girl finds the love and family warmth she’s always dreamed of—and blossoms. Having had a similar experience as a child, this story speaks to me on… show more.

I discovered this short and powerful novel at a small bookstore in the Berkshires and devoured it in one reading.

Told through the eyes of a young and impoverished girl in rural Ireland, Foster reels you into the narrative quietly, with a spare, evocative prose. “I wonder why my father lies about the hay. He is given to lying about things that would be nice, if they were true.”

Author Claire Keegan winds you into the story until you are fully immersed in the plot and characters, then lurches you into the unexpected, a haunting darkness that underlies the entire… show more.

This is a quiet book. A child’s father takes her to stay with relatives she has never met in the Irish countryside. Here, she finds affection, love, and warmth that have been absent from her life of poverty and stress in the city.

It is a lovely book I did not want to put down.

An Irish writer who tackles the treacherous and disturbing maltreatment of young orphaned girls. Made into a  brilliant film called The Quiet Girl.

Her writing is rightly compared to Chekhov for its suggestive understatement as it explores the psychology of a father who has lost a child with another father who is callous and indifferent to his own. As a devoted, hard working, hands-on father/grandfather myself I found this book deeply moving.