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 [...]