Critical Evaluation

“We critics are guilty of emphasizing, ad nauseam, the novella’s size. Our epithets (“short,” “slim,” “brief”) imply slightness, something lesser than, as if we owe the reader a trigger warning: not a novel.

“But who doesn’t want

to finish

a book over the course of a weekend?

“For 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.

“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. 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. This isn’t Sally Rooney’s Ireland, where posh Dublin millennials struggle in matters of love and privilege. 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.”

Gilvarry, Alex. The New York Times Book Review. “A Summer in Foster Care Is One of Ease, Not Abandonment.”

First Excerpt

” We walk through into the heat of the kitchen where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking there’s some disinfectant, some bleach. She lifts a rhubarb tart out of the oven and puts it on the bench to cool: syrup on the point of bubbling over, thin leaves of pastry baked into the crust. A cool draught from the door blows in, but here it is hot and still and clean. Tall ox-eyed daisies are still as the tall glass of water they are standing in. There is no sign, anywhere, of a child. “
Second Excerpt
“At first, I struggled with some of the bigger words, but Kinsella kept his fingernail under each, patiently, until I guessed it or half-guessed it and then I did this by myself until I no longer needed to guess, and read on. It was like learning to ride the bike; I felt myself taking off, the freedom of going places I couldn’t have gone before, and it was easy.”