Review: "Foster" by Claire Keegan

 

Foster by Claire Keegan
First published 2010
★★★★

Eastern Ireland: A girl is taken by her father to spend some time in another household. Her parents don't explain this, but they don't have to: there's another baby on the way, and there simply isn't enough money to look after all the children currently in the house. One fewer mouth to feed, if only for a while, will make a difference.

This slim little novella takes place in 1981—clear only through context clues—but serves as a reminder of just how far things have come in forty years. Our narrator's chief concerns about the situation when she is fostered out are whether there will be a bathroom or an outhouse and how much work she will be expected to do. She is well prepared and willing to work (and well prepared to use an outhouse), but today...the questions would be different. And: she wishes her father would stay long enough to say a proper goodbye, part of her wishes he wouldn't leave her at all, and part of her is curious about this new and easier life. The water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. (12)

Our narrator is young—how young is not said, but I'd guess early elementary school—and this is an easier life, a far more comfortable life, than she has known before. But the idyll cannot last, and as the novella progresses it becomes clear that there are things that she doesn't know about "the woman" and Kinsella, or why they have so readily taken her in. And: the adults know it too, that this idyll is not forever.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end—to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something—but each day follows much like the one before. (19)

I'm reminded of Awake and Dreaming—a novel for younger readers than Foster, yes, but with a similar sense of conflicted narrators who know enough to see what they're missing and also to know that some situations are too good to be true, and eventually one must wake up.