Five-Minute Recommendations: Foster by Claire Keegan

Kimberly will share whether you should-or should not-dig into Foster. She’ll treat you to a snippet of the prose to give you a sense of the work, but for a deeper analysis, check out the lecture

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That first sentence-“Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from”-gives the reader the impression that it’s a regular routine for the father to take his daughter to early Mass on Sunday. It’s a hint that the father and his little girl have some regular time together each week, and it feeds the reader’s hope that there’s some slight foundation of a parent/child relationship between them.
The passage in “Foster” that lingers in my mind is from Chapter 7, where Edna is helping the little girl pack her belongings for her return trip home: “Mrs Kinsella gives me a bar of yellow soap and my facecloth, the hairbrush. As we gather all these things together, I remember the days we spent, where we got them, what was sometimes said, and how the sun, for most of the time, was shining.”
The little girl is learning the power that physical objects can possess to elicit memories. As she prepares to return home, she is mentally reviewing the events of the summer just past, trying to preserve them in her memory while they are still fresh in her mind. One also has the sense of another voice blending with the child’s words towards the end of the sentence, the voice of the little girl as a grown woman fondly recalling that now distant summer with the Kinsellas. That’s the reason, I think, why “the sun, for most of the time, was shining”, because the adult is bathing her recollections with the amber glow of nostalgia.