Keegan’s world is a provincial one, and her characters, mostly farmers, discuss things like “the price of cattle, the E.E.C., butter mountains, the cost of lime and sheep-dip.” This adult world is mostly overheard by our narrator and observed with precise insight: “It is something I am used to, this way men have of not talking: They like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off.”Īlthough the time period in “Foster” is never stamped down, we determine we’re somewhere in the early 1980s by the adult chatter the girl overhears about the Irish hunger strike. This isn’t Sally Rooney’s Ireland, where posh Dublin millennials struggle in matters of love and privilege. The Kinsellas, John and Edna, have no children of their own and will foster the girl on their small farm in Wexford, toward the southeastern coast of Ireland. The narrator is a young girl in rural Ireland who is sent by her parents to live with the Kinsella family while her mother, Mary, carries to term another child in a household already bustling with siblings. Our epithets (“short,” “slim,” “brief”) imply slightness, something lesser than, as if we owe the reader a trigger warning: not a novel.īut who doesn’t want to finish a book over the course of a weekend?įor those of you who do, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, “Foster,” is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year. We critics are guilty of emphasizing, ad nauseam, the novella’s size.
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