Foster

 

Set in the rural southeastern coastal area of Ireland, "Foster" by Claire Keegan tells the story of a young child born into a family with too many mouths to feed and too little money to do it.  It is on a hot summer day after Mass that her father drives her to Wexford to live with the Kinsellas, relatives she doesn't even know. He stays long enough to engage in small talk about farming, sits down for some food to eat, then leaves her not with a kiss but with these parting words, "Try not to fall into the fire, you." She watched him drive down the road, "Why did he leave without so much as a good-bye, without even mentioning that he would come back for me?'

Keegan's writing is poignant, drawing you deeper into an emotionally bound story that will keep you reading from cover to cover. You never know the child's name, but you know everything she is feeling. You feel her sense of abandonment, her sense of fear and her sense of achievement as the novella unfolds.

The Kinsella's home is strikingly different from her parents. They say, 'yes' instead of 'yeah'. They have a freezer where 'perishables can be stored for months."  There is a toilet in the house but a chamber pot if the little girl is afraid to use it. There is a tub and she can take a bath when she needs. She has a bedroom with colorful trains and a small boy in the patterned wallpaper.  She thinks the boy looks sad. There is a sadness in this home because of the little boy that once slept in this bedroom.

The Kinsellas are a loving couple who enjoy having friends over for playing cards and playing the spoons. It is a lively home filled with laughter to help manage a tragedy of long ago. They are the parents she needs, and she is the daughter they need. But the summer is not yet over, and she does not know if she will be here or with her birth family when summer is over.