This was such a delightful book to read, although sometimes hard to read. This story is about a neglected child and how she finds love and affection in foster care. This book tells us how important love, care and kindness is. Truly a beautiful and impactful story!

Beautiful, powerful, and incredibly well written. An easy shorter story to get through and my first by Keegan but not my last!

Thanks to the publisher for the arc via Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Claire Keegan’s memorable and beautiful novella-sized book “Foster” is a moving story of a young girl in Ireland who temporarily has been farmed out to relatives to lessen the burden of a home packed with children, poverty, and unfeeling parents - a reckless, lying father and a cold, overworked mother. When the girl arrives at the Kinsella’s home, she is guarded, terse but polite, and untrusting of them and expectations. Without making overpowerful overtures to the girl, they draw her into their soft-spoken, steady, wise, kind ways, even as they handle a loss of their own. The girl’s given name is never revealed. But the terms of endearment by the Kinsella’s to her register within her and the reader instead. Instances of familial touches are new to her, such their holding her hand - something she consciously is aware her “da” has never done. Acts, people, the land, and events alter her perceptions of what family, trust, and protecting each other mean. She is enveloped into a life with the Kinsella’s where she thrives. Yet, she fears that fragility of it all, that something will happen, and all the “ease” will end.

The writer remarkably conveys the child’s blossoming awareness in exquisite descriptive detail of the world around the girl, such as the harvesting, the combines in motion, the trees, the sea waves - all on a child’s mental canvas filled with color, aromas, sounds, and new memories. Yet, with her past, the girl is highly perceptive, forming stoic thoughts and realizing nothing will be the same, things have changed. Writing such thoughts in a child’s mind must be challenging, but this writer does it superbly such that it feels authentic and profound. The Kinsella’s, the girl, and the reader know this is a temporary, probably heartbreaking arrangement. No fairy tale ending, but one that will linger as will the exceptional master writing by this author.

After having read Claire Keegan’s exceptional “Small Things Like These,” I had high expectations for “Foster” – and they were met and then some. These are two classics.

I am grateful to Grove Press, NetGalley, and Claire Keegan for the early access to this extraordinary book. This opinion is all my own.

Claire Keegan can write achingly beautiful stories using few words, and allows the reader to fill in the gaps. This is the type of writing that makes me glad to be a reader.

This is a novella, but one that needs to read slowly in order to read between the lines, and absorb what is being left unsaid. It’s a heartbreaking and poignant look at the power of kindness in the life of a young girl who has known only deprivation, and her rebirth after being shown love and kindness.

In one home she is living in abject poverty and seen as a burden, where even the most basics of needs are not met, especially love. In the other home, she is loved and cherished and seen as deserving of good things.

I love an author who trusts her readers. It’s not the things that are spoken that will break your heart, it’s the things that are unspoken. Her sparse prose belies the deep meaning within. The author is able to say so much and leaves you with a story that begs to be pondered.

And, oh that ending….

(4.5 stars)
I read an ARC of Small Things Like These in 2021 and loved it. When I saw that a book by the same author was available here on NetGalley too, I didn't hesitate. Foster had been sitting on my digital shelf until I learned that The Quiet Girl, one of The Academy's International Feature Film nominees, was based on this Claire Keegan novella. So, as a book and film enthusiast, I set about reading Foster to then watch the adaptation.

Claire Keegan writes stories about kindness and she succeeds at making you believe in its undeniable power, while at the same time slapping you in the face with the real world's heartlessness.

In Foster, a child is taken to live with a couple, the Kinsellas, during the summer. It might seem like there's not much going on besides that, but oh there is. She's a child; decisions are made for her and she doesn't know why. And in her world, every day spent with them brings more warmth and comfort and every day also brings time closer to an end.

I wondered how the novella would be translated into a full length film of an hour and a half. And well, it simply was. The Quiet Girl might possibly be the truest book-to-film adaptation I've seen yet. Everything is there, even if you cannot read Cáit's thoughts.

Foster is a jewel of a book that proves that good things come in small packages. It is a study in contrasts where one household, one family is found wanting in every way and the other is full of everything good and loving. It is the difference between a child being seen as a burden versus a gift to be cherished.

Keegan has given us a beautiful story of poverty and indifference, heartbreaking loss and shining love, not spoken aloud but shown in a hundred small ways. It is a story where a young, introverted girl thrives and matures in her found family and, as a result, she will always see the world through this new lens. It is the love that will stay with me and though it ends as it must, I can't help but imagine the story into the future. Could we have a sequel, please!

I received a drc from the publisher via Netgalley.

This book will break your heart. Nobody writes the small moments like Claire Keegan. this book is equally as good as the spectacular Small Things Like These.

Very short and very powerful — the kind of writing Claire Keegan is known for. You're going to get exactly what you expect from this one, and you'll enjoy it if that's your thing. I always want more from these — more perspective and more drama. But I understand what she set out to do, and goodness did she do it. But I probably won't remember it for long.

How does Claire Keegan do it? I marvel at her skills as an author.

This is the second book I have read of hers, Small Things Like These being the first. As with that book, Foster is deceptively simple. It's a slim volume. But it delivers such an emotional punch- softly, slowly but deftly.

This is the story of a young girl, told mostly from her vantage point, of being taken by her father to stay with a couple that her father knows. For how long? We don't know. Why? It isn't clear until we slowly come to understand that her mother has a brood already, her father is fairly useless as a provider/caretaker, and it would be easier of she was looked after until the mother gives birth, which is imminent. All this slowly is pieced together through conversations that we can understand and contextualize but she may not get. While she is in this home, she experiences a life unlike her own, and she aches to fit into the daily rhythms of the kind but hardworking man and woman.

She is an author who trusts her reader and doesn't pander or sentimentalize and yet is able to give us such depths of emotion in her work. This was a magnificent book.

“All you need is minding.” (Keegan’s “Foster”)

One of the best books I read in the past few years was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Nothing in Keegan’s “Foster” connects the two except time, “The Troubles”, and, loosely, place, given Radden Keefe’s is set in Northern Ireland and Keegan’s Ireland “proper”. One small detail tethered the story to Say Nothing: one character, a wife, tells her husband that one of the strikers has died and the reader immediately realizes it’s Bobby Sands, which factors in Keefe’s narrative and lets us glimpse the historical tragedy to Keegan’s small, domestic one.

“I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.”

Keefe’s book is sweeping, broadly and lengthily developped, and Keegan’s is short, barely encompassing the space of a summer, but what links them is a theme of loss. Keefe writes about what it means to die for a cause and never question its rightness and Keegan writes about children, where they are valued and where they are not, how one can be a loss and another, an unwanted burden. So that “Bobby Sands” moment in Keegan encompasses grief and loss in that act, not of the actor, but of those had to live with it. I’ve now gone ’round and ’round and have yet to offer details of what “Foster” is about; in the publisher’s nutshell:

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.

“This is a different type of house. Here there is room, and time to think.”

When the “child” and narrator is brought to the Kinsellas’ home, and it is a well-tended, plentiful, comfortable home, one she’s never experienced before, she is dirty, dishevelled, and feral. Her father, who delivers her, is a man without affection, or care for her (not abusive, indifferent and harsh). There is a lovely sequence of events, centred around water, that tell us how the child is initiated into her new life: she is bathed and shampooed, clothed, fed, and given comfort, a good, strong bed, books to read, and a beautiful garden and landscape to wander in. Mrs. Kinsella leads her to their well and she drinks deeply of refreshing water. Her spirit is replete with the goodness she is shown. One night, Mr. Kinsella takes her to the sea and, in a beautiful night-time scene, she is awed by it and realizes she has been close to it and never known it till now, much like how she didn’t know what life could be. She helps with household chores, more to keep her occupied than in keeping with her father’s idea she should be “worked” for her keep. Her life is transformed and, for the first time, she feels loved and satiated with good things.

“… ‘There are no secrets in this house.’ ‘Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’ “

Keegan’s novella is neither dramatic nor shocking: there is no physical, or sexual abuse, de rigueur in much contemporary literary fiction, the reader’s growing dread as we approach horrible revelations. There is a Joycian epiphany as the end, though any good reader has “read” it before the child realizes it, which isn’t Keegan’s point. It reminded me of the quietly devastating conclusion to Joyce’s “The Dead” and its impeccable, heart-stopping interpretation in John Huston’s film. If Radden Keefe’s narrative is about how a country and a cause can eat its children, then Keegan’s is more elemental and devastating, about how who we are because of to whom we are born can hurt us in surprising ways when we glimpse the promise of something else. If Radden’s “say nothing” during The Troubles kept the secrets and the shame hidden, then it is something entirely different in Keegan’s story:

“I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing.”

It only takes about half an hour to read Keegan’s “Foster” and a lifetime to think about it.

I am grateful to Grove Atlantic for the opportunity to read and review Keegan’s “Foster,” thanks to an e-ARC via Netgalley.

Quiet perfection. A story that explores the true meaning of love and family. The ending took my breath away.

Foster was the very last book that I decided to read for 2022. I sat down in the morning and did not get back up again until I was finished. The good thing is that it's only a brief 92 pages so I would plan your read to look something the same.

Foster is the story of a little girl who is sent to live with distant relatives for a brief period of the summer. It's a story of heart break and healing and also what it means to have family that care for you and provide a respite from your current situation which we all know is needed.

This book was definitely a warm hug and I keep thinking about it even today. I know I will be picking it up again very, very soon.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for allowing me the opportunity to read and review this book.

5★
“A big, loose hound whose coat is littered with the shadows of the trees lets out a few rough, half-hearted barks, then sits on the step and looks back at the doorway where the man has come out to stand.”

This is the first the young girl sees of the place her father is leaving her. She doesn’t know for how long, but her mother is having another baby, and she would just be in the way at home. Her father says almost nothing.

“He turns to me then. ‘Try not to fall into the fire, you.’ I watch him reverse, turn into the lane, and drive away. “

There are no children in the house, and she is almost overwhelmed when the woman later gives her a big, long luxurious bath, something she has never had all to herself!

“The bath fills and the white room changes so that a type of blindness comes over us; we can see everything and yet we can’t see.”

When they look for the girl’s clean clothes, they both realise her father has left her in such a rush that he forgot to leave her belongings. Some small pants and shirts are found, and the girl begins to settle in.

She’s very unsure of herself, but she enjoys helping on the farm, and unlike stories of mean-spirited foster parents who take kids in just for free labour, these people seem to care about her. At one point she hesitates to reply to the man.

“He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh. I don’t know what to say. ‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’”

What good advice. Both the husband and wife pay attention to her and offer suggestions and build her confidence. When she learns something of their history, she begins to understand them.

Her behaviour reminds me of a rescue pet that is unsure what to expect – punishment or kindness. We are all animals, conditioned by our circumstances, after all.

The word foster can mean to take care of a child, usually temporarily. It can also mean to encourage an interest or talent, or growth. I think Keegan uses it in both senses of the word. I’m partial to her stories and her people, so of course I thoroughly enjoyed this novella. Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the copy for review.

It was a lovely read to end my reading year with. Happy New Year!

What a beautifully written book! Claire Keegan is able to portray the lives of her characters in concise well crafted language. We are drawn to the story of the young girl who is dropped off for an indeterminate period of time with a couple she has not known. She is cared for in a way that she has not experienced and blossoms with the love and care that are quietly given to her. At first confused, she learns to love back. Keegan is an exceptional writer; able to show us in very few words what she wants us to see.

This short novella is absolutely beautiful. In Ireland, a young girl is taken to relatives for the summer. There, she finds a love that she has not received from her family. This tender story had me in tears at the end.

Claire Keegan has done again what she does best — that is, to say, writing a book that I will never stop raving about.

I read Small Things Like These last year. I was enchanted by Keegan’s pen then, and (I’d have never believed it possible) I’m more enchanted by it now that I’ve read Foster. Keegan writes effortlessly, simplistically, and almost in representation of the realism movement in the 21st century. This is what sets her apart, what helps her create narrations that read like classics.

Foster is in ways similar to Small Things Like These, and differs from it in other ways, all of which are exactly perfect. As in that everyman epic, things in Foster do not change on a grand level either. Keegan’s stories are not big, but personal, and for that, extremely powerful. They do not feel repetitive: the narrative voice for Foster is its own thing. Foster is also much more emotional, perhaps because it deals with a more personal matter, perhaps because it’s written through the eyes of a child — it also has moments of exquisite symbolism.

Foster is short, and its narration flows. Despite its brevity, Foster does not lack in impact, and as such, is a testament to Keegan’s incredible talent for making the mundane, the negligible into something that feels as great as a myth.

Because Christmas is approaching, I have to add that Keegan’s books will make amazing gifts not just for bookworms, but for everyone — it’s impossible not to devour her work, to fall in love with it.

I’d like to extend my immense gratitude to Grove Atlantic for giving me access to the DRC when I “wished for it” on NetGalley.

I am always intrigued when novels or novellas are republished, especially as standalones, in new territories. It tells me that there was something valuable about this story before and that the publisher believes the story has something important to say to other readers as well. Foster is a quiet tale that nonetheless has something to say. Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novella in exchange for an honest review.

A girl is dropped off at the Kinsellas' house by her father one Sunday, during a hot summer. Her parents have another child on the way and can hardly feel the numerous ones they have, so she is sent off to the Kinsellas for as long as they'll have her. Once there, the girl moves between fears and new discoveries, gaining a growing awareness of how life could be. One of the most heart-breaking aspects of Foster is the way the girl is drawn to this new, kinder life and yet would almost prefer to run away from it because it is making her realize what she lacked before. It is this double-edged knife of realization, of the pain of yearning, and the potential harm in receiving, which had me enamored with Foster almost immediately. Keegan gives no clear answers in this novella, there is no definitive path, no happy or unhappy resolution. Instead there are questions, countless potential paths, and the awareness that things will always continue shifting. The ending, as I've seen in other reviews, is an unclear one, yet is utterly cinematic and empathic and emotional in tone. You can picture it, can feel the way her two different lives are tearing at the girl. And the last line is a mystery that each reader has to resolve for themselves. This can be frustrating, if you prefer clarity, but it is a masterful feat by Keegan to pull of an ending that is at once so crystal-clear and so opaque.

At one point John Kinsella tells the girl that silence has its value, that being asked does not mean an answer is required, that waiting to see is sometimes the better path. Foster follows this path down to its last word, playing with silence, playing with what is and isn't said. Our protagonist has no name, and she also doesn't really use the names of others. Those aren't relevant pieces of information. What is relevant is the way the light shines in from the windows, how soft Edna Kinsella's hand is, how the girl suddenly has time to be and think, how she goes from tracing and guessing words to knowing them. Keegan's keen eye for detail doesn't show itself in its overabundance but in its precise limitation. She picks out what is truly important and describes that with a warmth that fully envelops the reader. Everything around it is confetti, as The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix says.

Foster won't be the story for everyone, due to Keegan's careful and spare prose. But those who can unlock it and see the richness behind it, Foster has incredibly feeling and insight to offer.

Foster is a stunning and vibrant novella that manages to say so much while leaving much unnamed. This is one of my favourite reads this year.

Published by Grove Press on November 1, 2022

The mother in a large family is about to have another baby. The parents can barely feed the children they already have. They ask a childless couple to take one of their daughters until her mother gives birth. Only after the girl has lived with the Kinsellas for part of the summer does a neighboring gossip reveal why the couple is childless.

The girl is initially ambivalent about staying with strangers. She doesn’t know how long she will stay with the Kinsellas or whether her parents will want her back. Her father doesn’t say goodbye to her when he drops her off. Like the other adult men she has observed, her father says little of consequence. He talks about the weather, exaggerates the size of his crop of hay when he talks to John Kinsella. “He is given to lying about things that would be nice, if they were true.”

Like the girl’s parents, the Kinsellas are farmers. Unlike her parents, they are making a go of it. John and Edna welcome the girl into their lives. Edna gives the girl a hot bath, cleans her nails, digs wax out of her ears, does all the things her mother is too busy to do. John helps her with her reading and corrects her when she substitutes “yeah” for “yes.” When the girl’s complexion begins to improve, Edna says “All you need is minding.” Every child needs minding if they are to stay safe and reach their full potential. Edna has become protective with no child of her own to mind, which might explain her failure to understand how the girl’s parents could leave her with strangers.

Edna would like to give the girl’s mother some money, but the girl knows that her proud father would object. Her father drinks. He lost their red heifer gambling. Her parents have given little thought to educating her. Her clothes are hand-me-downs. She isn’t the victim of abuse, but to some extent, she has been neglected.

Visiting the Kinsellas opens a new world for the girl, a world where reading is valued, where she can wear clothing that fits. John challenges her to run to the mailbox every day and is proud when she becomes faster. Having adults pay attention to her, to encourage her, makes the summer away from her family pass quickly. In the Kinsella home, she has “room and time to think.” She would rather stay than return home.

As Colm Tóibín has done in his fiction, Claire Keegan emphasizes the malicious gossip that characterizes life in rural Ireland (and for that matter, in much of small-town America). When a neighbor has a chance to talk to the girl alone, she pries into the details of the Kinsellas’ life and tells her the secret John and Edna have kept to themselves. The girl wonders at the neighbor’s smug, self-satisfied laughter when she reveals a family tragedy that is none of the girl’s business, nor the neighbor’s. The Kinsellas keep their grief to themselves, but they have not let it overwhelm their ability to live or to care about others.

Foster is a spare story. Much in the novella is left unsaid. The relationship of the Kinsellas to the girl’s parents is unclear. We learn little about the girl’s siblings. We don’t even know the girl’s name. She has no reason to tell us those things. She instead narrates her thoughts, fears, and discoveries. She describes unfamiliar events (John is asked to dig a grave for a neighbor; she sees her first dead body at the wake). She learns that people are different from each other. Edna differs from the gossipy neighbor because, as John explains it, Edna “wants to find the good in others, and her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is.”

From John, the girl learns that there are times when it is better to practice silence. “Many’s the man lost much just because he missed the perfect opportunity to say nothing.” The girl makes good use of that advice when she next sees her parents.

The novella’s ending, like life, leaves the reader wondering what will happen next. It doesn’t seem likely to be good, at least in the next few minutes that will follow the story’s end. On the other hand, the girl’s life has likely been changed, set on a path of undreamt possibilities, because strangers were kind to her. Perhaps she has a sense of what her life could be. John tells her that women are good with “eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before men even get a whiff of it.”

The eventualities are left for the reader to ponder. Everything that comes before the reader’s imagination takes over is told in a young, gentle voice. The girl senses the importance of events. She overlooks nothing but understands less than the adult reader. This is a coming of age story told by a girl who isn’t prepared to understand what might come next. The girl will need to think about what she has learned before it all makes sense to her. The joy of Foster is that the same is true for the reader.

RECOMMENDED

This wasn't my favorite, but I am a picky reader. I think other readers will enjoy it, and this is an obvious addition to the collection.

4.5 Stars

Thanks #Netgalley @GroveAtlantic for a complimentary e ARC of #Foster upon my request. All opinions are my own.

I chose to read two titles by Claire Keegan for Novellas in November.

In Foster, we have a child narrator who is sent to live with foster parents (distant relatives) while her mother gives birth to another child. In this new temporary home, the child (never named) flourishes and finds affection and warmth she has never known. She is conflicted because as much as she wants to return home, she soaks up the care, attention, and love she experiences in her foster home. Returning home means overcrowding, poverty, and neglect. How difficult it will be for her foster parents to return her! Beautifully written with exquisite characterizations.

What did I love most? I appreciate and love a found family trope, the poignant themes, and the beautiful writing. I could easily reread this story and keep it on my forever shelf.

I wish this story had a more satisfying ending. It’s a bit too open-ended for me and I had to reread the ending multiple times to come to some sort of conclusion in my head about what would happen.

Although this is a sad and heartbreaking read, it would make a fabulous book club selection because of the discussion possibilities! I’ll definitely be reading more of Keegan’s work!