Claire Keegan - Foster (2010)

 

Foster is a short novella, which can be read in one sitting, almost like a short story, set in rural Ireland some decades ago. The writer Claire Keegan has become more internationally known as the author of the novel Small things like these. In Foster she picks up a similar topic, that of children rejected by their families for one reason or another, and fostered by grand-hearted others, it is very moving.

She writes this immersive fiction that in very few pages makes it possible for the reader to be there, to see and smell and hear the story. Foster is written from a child's perspective. The girl is send to spend the summer with a better-off family, the Kinsellas, while her mother gives birth to another sibling. It is not clear if they are related as her aunt and uncle or not.

While in the beginning everything is a bit strange for her. No one tells her exactly how long she is going to stay there, if she has to work, or if there are other children. The bathwater is as hot as she has never had it, people come over at night to play cards and laugh. She just tries to behave her best, but soon she settles in and develops a very special relation with the foster Dad and also with the foster Mom, they cook together, buy clothes, go fetch the post, walk on the beach and generally respect each other.

She soon discovers the secret of the family which is not so much a secret but a tragedy they kept from her in the beginning, which is that the Kinsellas have lost their own son in a terrible accident which explains the children's clothes and wallpapers in her room. In the end of the summer she has to say goodbye and return home for a new school year, probably keeping what happened at the Kinsellas a secret to her own family, it would be difficult to put in words.

The great thing about the novel is as I said, the social and emotional atmosphere which soaks you in, you can see the neighbours gossiping, imagine walking down the fields to the well, or pulling the vegetables out of the garden beds.