Published in 2010, this novella is by Claire Keegan, whose Small Things Like These I enjoyed so much a little while ago.

Why this book? Purely because it was Irish, short, and available on Libby...

But it turned out to be an excellent pick... Keegan is SO good at doing an enormous amount in an incredibly short space. Foster is so simple, and yet it encompasses a whole big bundle of understated emotion: Regret; gratitude; joy; longing; grief; resilience...



***

The story goes like this (beware spoilers, if you've not read it):

In the early 1980s, an unnamed little girl (our narrator) is farmed out with relatives, John and Edna Kinsella, because her mother, Mary, is expecting yet another baby, and the family are not coping well.

The narrator (I'll call her N.) arrives knowing nothing of what to expect. She doesn't know these people; doesn't know how long she's staying; doesn't know what they'll want her to do. Dan, her father, warns them she eats a lot -- "but ye can work her". No need for that, says John, with a tiny hint of reproach: She'll just help Edna round the house.

We're not impressed with Dan, even after just a few pages. His hay is not in (Mary hasn't had the money to pay the workers), and yet he boasts to the Kinsellas that he has haylofts full of the stuff. "He is given," N. tells us, "to lying about things that would be nice, if they were true." He also loses valuable items at card games, is partial to the odd "liquid supper", and generally comes across as proud but feckless.

Mary, on the other hand, you feel really sorry for. She works hard, and hasn't enough time to look after her brood. So the little girl arrives with the Kinsellas more than a little unkempt:

"'Does your mammy not clean out your ears?'
"'She hasn't always time,' I say, guarded.
"'I suppose the poor woman doesn't,' she says, 'what with all of ye.'"

And yet Mary has taught her daughter plant names: Chamomile, wood sage, wild mint... It's not that she doesn't care...


County Wexford, 2026. Dan drives N. "deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother's people came from"

***

N. realizes immediately that this place she has been shipped off to is "a different type of house. Here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare."

And this is her first experience of people who have time to care for her. As Edna scrubs and extracts and soaps, attempting to restore N. to cleanliness, the little girl realizes: "Her hands are like my mother's hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed."

Edna is very kind and discreet when the child wets the bed. She unassumingly involves her little charge in household tasks, and shares her methodical ways: "She likes to cut things up, to scrub and have things tidy, and to call things what they are."

John, meanwhile, encourages her to run, and makes her daily sprint to the mailbox into a game. He has a nice way of talking to her, teasing but gentle. Gives her pocket money when they go to Gorey to buy her some clothes: "Ah, what is she for, only for spoiling?" And over the summer period, he teaches her to read.

"And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end... but each day follows on much like the one before."


Gorey: "a crowded place with a wide main street"

***

But, of course, under the surface, something is amiss. Edna has made a thing about openness: "There are no secrets in this house, do you hear?... Where there's a secret... there's shame -- and shame is something we can do without." And yet there is a secret. Little whiffs of it. Little incongruities. Little hints of sadness.

It turns out the couple are grieving the loss of their own child, a boy, who "followed the dog into the slurry tank, and drowned", as a neighbour bluntly and unhelpfully tells N. when neither John nor Edna is around. Ahh... so that explains the boy's clothes they initially put her in when she brought no clean things of her own.

John comes to fetch the little girl from this noxious neighbour's house. She's quiet, the woman comments. To which John responds: "She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her."

Afterwards, having discovered that N. is now abreast of the couple's secret grief, he takes her for a walk by the beach. A decompression measure, as it were. "Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won't have to feel this. It's a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be." Lynn Steger Strong is right when she says the whole book "feels almost completely contained" in that little scene "in which our narrator chooses to continue to hold Kinsella's hand".

At the end of that chapter, and that walk, N. recalls, "he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own".

He has also offered her some life wisdom: "'You don't ever have to say anything,' he says. 'Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.'"


So like this year: They talked of "how little rain there is, how the fields need rain, how the priest in Kilmuckridge prayed for rain that very morning, how a summer like it has never before been known"

***

And then, the season changes, and the idyll ends: "After a week of rain, on a Thursday, the letter comes." Mary has had her baby. The girl can go home.

She's very sad about this, but as what has to be has to be, she wants to get it over with immediately.

But then there's an incident. While the Kinsellas are busy, the girl goes off to fetch water. And falls in the well... It's as though invisible hands have pulled her in, she says. She's sick for a few days. And Edna is racked with guilt: "When I think of what could have happened..."

But N.'s return can't be delayed any more. And home now feels odd. The house feels damp and cold; the floors are dirty; the kitchen is in disarray. Her sisters seem different, thinner, shier.

N., meanwhile, now visibly has a cold. But nothing is revealed about her ducking in the well:

"'The child's been in the bed for the last couple of days,' says Kinsella. Didn't she catch herself a wee chill.'
"'Aye,' says Da. 'You couldn't mind them. You know yourself.'
"'Dan,' Ma says, in a steel voice.'"

What did Dan mean by that comment? It sounds barbed... But Mary is placatory: "Sure isn't it going around?"

Anyway, the Kinsellas leave, with a hug and a kiss.

"'What happened at all?' Ma says, now that the car is gone.
"'Nothing,' I say.
"'Tell me.'
"'Nothing happened.' This is my mother I am speaking to but I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing."

And N. runs off after the Kinsellas, regretting that there has been no proper goodbye.


"Gorey is a nice town. I don't know why I didn't think of taking you there before now"

***

The close is harrowing. This child, who was facing the unknown when we first met her, has blossomed under the care of the Kinsellas -- the kind of care her own family just can't give her. Now she has to say goodbye to these warm and generous people. The separation also tears open all the Kinsellas' old wounds. John sweeps N. up, holds her tight. And she closes her eyes: "When I finally open my eyes and look over his shoulder, it is my father I see, coming along strong and steady, his walking stick in his hand. I hold on as though I'll drown if I let go, and listen to the woman who seems, in her throat, to be taking it in turns, sobbing and crying, as though she is crying not for one now, but for two. I daren't keep my eyes open and yet I do, staring up the lane, past Kinsella's shoulder, seeing what he can't. If some part of me wants with all my heart to get down and tell the woman who has minded me so well that I will never, ever tell, something deeper keeps me there in Kinsella's arms, holding on.

"'Daddy,' I warn him, I call him. 'Daddy.'"

***

And so it ends.

What an education... That your own family is not necessarily the most nurturing place for you to be; that even the kindest people are driven into deceit by grief; that silence is powerful; that your heart can be broken...

Totally nailing the impact of this book are Marcela Santos Brigida: "Foster deserves all its accolades. Its language is succinct, even economical, but it contains multitudes in what is left unsaid"; and Heller McAlpin: "More than most books four times its size, Foster does several of the things we ask of great literature: It expands our world, diverting our attention outward, and it opens up our hearts and minds. This is a small book with a miraculously outsized impact."

Couldn't agree more.