Infinite Books

A short gourmet comparison: I’d rather have one exquisite chocolate or a bag of cheap, sugary candies. Undoubtedly enjoying superb chocolate doesn’t last as long as the seemingly endless chewing of sweets, yet the quality of the experience is incomparable. This is the case with Claire Keegan’s short novel “Foster.”  It’s easy to finish it in one sitting, but the experience is better than reading some 500+ pages of stories.

In a hot summer of 1981 in rural Ireland, a father takes his daughter to stay on a Wexton farm with distant relatives. The girl leaves her house, not knowing how long this arrangement will last; her mother is pregnant with yet another child, and her father, distant and cold, doesn’t explain anything. This is not surprising that she isn’t considered worthy of explanations: in her family, children are supposed to listen.

Her new family is different. A childless couple, John and Edna Kinsella are not especially rich, although “there is plenty of food and money to spare,” but most important, there is “room and time to think .” The girl helps Edna with everyday chores: weeding the garden, cleaning the house, and baking tarts. The Kinsellas listen to her and encourage reading, and when  John finds out that she is a good runner, he invents a playful game of running to the mailbox and recording her time. Edna bathes her and takes her shopping for clothes. The girl is shocked when on their walk on an uneven path, Mr. Kinsella takes her hand and slows down, so they walk together. Her father never did this; there was no reason to show children kindness and affection.

 The girl is told that there are no secrets in the house: where secrets exist, there is shame. Yet, she learns from a nosy neighbor that the Kinsellas experienced a terrible loss. That may be why they can appreciate even more how precious time is, and spending it with a girl eager to learn is so important.

It’s challenging to write the coming of age stories with children as the narrators and avoid subconscious preaching while maintaining the world’s view through a child’s eyes, with its realism and poetry. Children depend on their parents very much and can’t do much without their love. Without appreciation and encouragement, a child can’t, using a biological comparison, change from a caterpillar to a butterfly. This metamorphosis happened to the little girl, and Claire Keegan described it beautifully. The summer brought the sun into the little girl’s life, and the warmth of her foster parents allowed her to open her wings.

FOSTER, by Claire Keegan, Grove Press, 2022