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Title: Foster
Author: Claire Keegan    
First published: 2010
Dates read: 12. 08. – 13. 08. 2021
Category: first time read, library book, novella, Irish literature
Rating: 4/5
The book in five words or less: atmospheric, beautiful, melancholy

My thoughts:

Originally published as a short story in the New Yorker in 2010 and later expanded, Foster is a short but atmospheric novella set in Ireland sometime in the 1980s. A girl from a poor but large farming family is given as a foster child to a childless couple of distant relatives, with whom she spends a few summer weeks. With the Kinsellas she finds warmth and affection, rituals, challenges, and validation, all things that are in short supply in her crowded home, but she also encounters secrets and strange adult behaviour that she does not fully understand. What evolves from this premise is a beautifully written, concise but also dreamlike story of love, loss, and belonging.

Foster, written entirely from the anonymous girl’s perspective, is compelling and convincing as the story of a child who tries to make sense of new experiences and an expanding world. What is more, Claire Keegan’s writing is eloquent, subtle and atmospheric, mastering complex relationships and social interactions and beautiful landscapes and locations in equal measure. Foster is a beautiful book, deeper and more melancholy than it seems at first glance, and best read in a single summer afternoon.

Read if you like: Seamus Heaney’s landscape poetry, stories where more is communicated than what is said, books where seasons become palpable, summer afternoons

***

(In case you have noticed, I’ve started reviewing my 20 Books of Summer books out of order again. I’m having trouble focusing again lately and some reviews are decidedly easier and faster to write than others; I thought getting them out in any order is better than not getting them out at all)