FOSTER by Claire Keegan-Forming a Family from Strangers

Claire Keegan affecting novella, FOSTER, builds assured feelings of affection between a young girl and her aunt and and uncle at a leisurely pace that overflow in an emotional climatic ending.  An unnamed young girl is being driven to a relatives home to be left for the summer amount with little warmth by her distracted father.  The girl captures our hears from the beginning by her stoic disposition and keen observations.  "Why did he leave without so much as a good-bye, without ever mentioning that he would come back for me?" she asks herself.  The guardians, the Kinsellas, are reserved but concerned for the girl left in their care whom we learn are her aunt and uncle.  Written in an austere style that suits the quietness of the novella, the bonds of trust emerge.  Her aunt's steady tutelage of household chores and the uncle's gentle attentions fill the hallows of the girl's longing for affection she wasn't aware existed. "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."  The girl learn's of the loss of the only child her aunt and uncle had from a busybody neighbor bent on gaining illicit information from the girl about the couple.  This comic interlude cuts sharply against the kindness and respect she's come to know under her aunt and uncle's care for her and for each another.  The lyrical prose reflect the girl's dawning of the changes she's finding in herself.  She hesitates before glancing at own her reflection in the water.  "For a moment, I am afraid,  I wait until I see myself not as I was when I arrived, looking like a gypsy child, but as I am now, clean, in different cloths, with the woman behind me."  Simple acts of endearment first strike the girl as painful. She considers as her uncle takes her hand, "I realize 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.  It's a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and the let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be."  This novella is to be treasured for the beauty of its writing that washes over from mundane activities to an outpouring torrent of love.  "I hold on as though I'll drown if I let go, and listen to the woman who seems in her throat, to be taking it in turns, sobbing and crying, as though she is crying not for one, but for two."