Foster 

By Claire Keegan

128 pages

Published Nov. 1, 2022

I don’t know how I came to have it. But I know how I came to read it. I wrote a review of Small Things Like These, a book by the same author, Claire Keegan, on Nov. 22, 2022. That was my first encounter with her. I wrote then:

“Every once in a while, I read a book that makes me want to read everything the author has written. That is how I feel after reading Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These….   It’s been a long time since I discovered a writer that humbled me like Claire Keegan did with this book. (The last time, I think, it was Cormac McCarthy.) She writes perfectly proportioned paragraphs. Beautifully simple and simply beautiful sentences.”

This is another small book. And another literary gem. A deeply touching story about a young girl, one of many children in a large family living in rural Ireland, who is sent by her parents to live with a neighboring couple that have no children of their own.

The story is told in the first person. And Keegan does an amazing job of both first-person storytelling and engineering the voice of a child. I was several times reminded of what Mark Twain did with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

What I Liked About It

* The story feels true in a universal way.

* The dialog is rich and authentic in an Irish writerly way.

* The writing is both exquisitely literary and invisible. I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

What I Didn’t Like 

Nothing.