Foster by Claire Keegan

Title: Foster
Author: Claire Keegan
Publication: Grove Press, hardcover, originally published in 2010
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: Ireland

Description: One summer, a young girl is brought by her father to stay with relatives on a farm while her mother is pregnant. She arrives dusty and timid but the Kinsellas make her welcome and slowly she gains confidence. At first, she wears hand-me-downs and shrinks from her hosts but she becomes comfortable and participates in her hostess’ household chores: “we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot press and hoover out the spider webs, and put all the clean clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, pull the weeds out of the flower beds and then, when the sun goes down, water things.” The Kinsellas nurture her and buy her new clothes. At the end of the summer, her mother sends a letter, announcing the arrival of a new brother and telling them to bring the girl back that weekend, as school is about to start. She is returned to the crowded house and the parents too busy or indifferent to ensure she is loved.

My Impression: A version of this novella appeared as a short story in the New Yorker and a movie based on Foster, The Quiet Girl, was nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year. It is a wistful story about a girl who is neglected by her own parents but finds affection from strangers and does not want to go home. She is nameless (my second book about nameless protagonists in about ten days) which I suppose is intended to emphasize both her lack of agency and her unimportance to her parents. Although her age is not mentioned, she is young enough to wet the bed but can read, although not well. She is old enough to tell when her father is lying and she knows that her mother does not want more children.

She also realizes that in contrast to her family the Kinsellas have more money: they have a freezer, which she has never seen before. More importantly, they are abundantly kind as is shown when she wets her bed the night of her arrival, and the girl expects to be in trouble:

I want to tell her right away, to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over.

‘These old mattresses,’ she says, ‘they weep. They’re always weeping. What was I thinking of, putting you on this?’

We drag it down the stairs, out into the sunlit yard . . . We scrub it with detergent and hot water and leave it there in the sun to dry.

‘That’s terrible,’ she says. ‘A terrible start, altogether. After all that, I think we need a rasher.’

Mr. Kinsella is noticeably kinder than the girl’s father, who dumped her with strangers with barely a word and never said if he would return to get her (at one point, it seems as if he was physically abusive). Mr. Kinsella buys her books and helps her with her reading. When he takes her hand and brings her to see the sea, the child realizes her father has never held her hand. And when her mother writes to summon her home, she does not want to return and who can blame her? The Kinsellas do have a secret but it only makes them care more for their shy guest.

I am not usually a fan of short stories (the author says this is not a novella); it seems as if the minute one gets invested, it is over. However, there is a lot going on in this story and I can tell that it will be interesting to discuss with my group of attorneys and the judge we clerked for next week (we read Keegan’s Small Things Like These several months ago). The book takes place in the early 80s (yet no running water for the Kinsellas; maybe the farm is too isolated?) so I will count this as my eighteenth book for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Have you read anything by Claire Keegan?  She seems to be the flavor of the month.  While this girl is not an orphan, I was thinking about Anne Shirley and wondering what would have happened to her if she had not been allowed to stay at Green Gables.

Source: Library