Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

'The child will have no more to do than help Edna around the house.'' Later, the girl describes her daily routine: 'Myself and Mrs. 'There'll be no need for any of that,' he says. Kinsella's reaction, a subtle reprimand to her father: 'Kinsella looks up. Here there is room, and time to think.'īefore her father hurries off without so much as a hug, he warns the Kinsellas that the girl eats a lot, 'but ye can work her.' The girl notices Mr. Kinsella, even taller than her mother, 'looks at my clothes, I see my thin, cotton dress, my dusty sandals through her eyes.' The girl quickly recognizes that 'this is a different type of house. 'Tall shiny panes,' clean kitchen tiles, daisies on the table, the smell of disinfectant and bleach and the rhubarb tart in the oven all strike her as remarkable. We come to recognize the deprivations of the girl's former life indirectly, through the things she notices, which are so different from what she's used to. The nameless narrator of Foster is a little girl whose parents, impoverished Catholic farmers already overwhelmed by too many children and the father's bad habits, farm her out to distant relatives she's never met when her mother's belly is 'hard with the next baby.' When her father drives her after Mass one summer Sunday 'deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother's people came from,' she has no idea what to expect - whether she'll be worked hard or treated kindly, and for how long.īook Reviews 'Small Things Like These' add up to a seismic change in 1980s Ireland Together, this pair of Keegan's novellas pack a one-two punch.

It is a beautiful companion to last year's Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These, her Christmas story and morality tale that makes Dickens' Christmas Carol and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl seem like glitter-dusted fairy tales. It appeared in a slightly abbreviated version in The New Yorker, but this new standalone volume is the first publication of the full text in the U.S. Since its original publication in 2010, Foster has become part of the school curriculum in her native Ireland. If she has published anything that isn't perfect, I haven't seen it. Keegan's output is scarce and her stories are as spare as they are heartrending, whittled down to the essential.

She shares their keen sense of empathy, eye for the telling detail, and deep attunement to the moral issues raised by meanness and suffering for witnesses as well as the afflicted. Claire Keegan has been compared to the Russian author Anton Chekhov and fellow Irish writer William Trevor.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan