Foster is set during a hot summer in rural Ireland. A young girl is left by her father with relatives on a farm in County Wexford, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house she finds a warmth and tenderness she has not known before, and slowly begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this quiet household, and the summer must soon come to an end.
My Review
Foster follows an unnamed girl, one of many children in a struggling Irish family, sent for the summer to stay with the Kinsellas, farming relatives she has never met. Her mother is pregnant again. No one tells her how long she’ll be gone. She arrives with very little, in every sense of the word, and finds herself in a house where hot baths exist, where kindness is offered without conditions, where someone holds her hand.
That last detail, so small, lands like a quiet shock. Her own father has never done it.
“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.”
Keegan writes with a deliberate, almost surgical spareness, and it suits the material perfectly. What is left unsaid in this book does as much work as what is said, which is considerable. The Kinsellas carry a sorrow the girl senses long before she understands it, and the way that grief moves through the story, never named, never explained, only felt, is exactly the kind of writing that makes you stop and sit for a moment before turning the page. The back-to-front Irish syntax in the dialogue grounds everything beautifully in place and time.
My one reservation, and it kept the book at four stars rather than five for me, is the narrator’s voice itself. There are moments where the child’s observations feel too calibrated, too wise, raising the question of how much adult hindsight is shaping what should be a child’s unmediated experience. It is a fine line, and Keegan walks it with considerable skill, but she doesn’t always stay on the right side of it.
Still: this is a rare and precise piece of work. It asks you to bring yourself to the gaps, and what you find there is the story.
“Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”