Foster

June 1, 2022

Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize and considered a classic in Ireland, Keegan's novella features a young girl who finds fleeting happiness when she's sent to live with foster parents in rural Ireland. It appeared here in an earlier version in The New Yorker and is expected to garner attention following the success of Keegan's multi-best-booked Small Things Like These.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 12, 2022
This charming novella from Irish writer Keegan (Small Things Like These) follows a young girl who’s unceremoniously dropped off by her rapscallion father to live on an older couple’s farm in the early 1980s. The girl harnesses a piercing view of her father, who is “given to lying about things that would be nice, if they were true,” and her new guardians, John and Edna Kinsella, whose only child drowned, are generous in spirit and provide a home for her to thrive (“here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare”). With the loving guidance of the Kinsellas, the girl undergoes a transformation: “I try to remember another time when I felt like this and am sad because I can’t remember a time, and happy, too, because I cannot.” Things get complicated when the girl’s mother writes to the Kinsellas, saying she wants the girl back, and the resulting scenes are deeply moving as Keegan portrays the swings of mood and circumstance for a foster child who is held captive by circumstance. The result will capture readers’ hearts. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

Starred review from November 11, 2022

After arriving to stateside success with 2021's compact but powerful Small Things Like These, another of Keegan's books (a novella first published in Ireland and the UK in 2010) now makes its arrival. And much like last year's release, it proves Keegan's gift for demolishing rigid notions of packaged form. Despite running only a slim 90 pages, this work is an immensely powerful snapshot novel, affectingly communicating the emotional weight of personal history with an economy of language. Though it documents only a few weeks in the life of a young Irish girl who goes to stay with distant relatives while her mother gives birth to her latest child (of many) and her childhood awakening to the thorniness of life, this work mines the recesses of human fragility with a compassionate and deft pen, its combination of simple language and sweeping empathy landing with the force of a saga. But as with Small Things Like These, Keegan takes care here not to overenunciate the emotional stakes of her laconic narrative, forgoing any tilt toward the sensational or melodramatic that too often plagues short-form works. Instead, she allows her deeply humanistic story simply to wonder at the small joys and tragedies of humble lives. VERDICT Keegan offers further evidence of her facility at imbuing short fiction with immense feeling and invoking a deceptively grand scale; a rich, compassionate work that will appeal to a wide range of readers.--Luke Gorham

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2022
A young girl is sent to live temporarily with distant relatives while her mother awaits the birth of yet another child. Dropped unceremoniously by her father at the Kinsellas' farmhouse, the girl takes it all in--the gruff barking of a dog, the weeping trees, the shiny windows. It's a far different home than the one she's left. "Here there is room to think." And think our unnamed narrator does, of the way Edna's touch is gentler than her mother's, of the reserved affection John bestows, of the unspoken sadness that pervades their every action and kindness. With a child's open curiosity and inherent acuity, the girl pieces together the Kinsellas' history from the merest glance and through the pointed questions of the villagers. Acclaimed Irish writer Keegan, author most recently of the Booker Prize-longlisted Small Things Like That (2021), wrote this as a short story that appeared in 2010 in the New Yorker. She has expanded it, and the resulting novella is now available in the U.S. In a quiet way, line by line, Keegan invites the reader to pay attention, for the wonder is in the details, in which nothing occurs, but everything happens. A gem of a book, to be savored again and again.

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