Claire Keegan

This book deserves to be the next A Christmas Carol in the English language. Surely, even Charles Dickens cannot outdo Claire Keegan. In this work, she touches on themes of religious hypocrisy in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. The message of Christmas and of the Christian Gospel, with their themes of oppressed things becoming great, is juxtaposed against an entrenched church beholden to money, power, and a corrupt socioeconomic system.

This month of March, my Sunday School class is show more reading and discussing this book together. I started it in anticipation of finishing one or two chapters before our first class. Instead, I became engrossed in the story and read it through to the entire end in one afternoon. At 116 pages, it’s power-packed with action – and more importantly, movements of the heart. In a jeremiad of sorts, Keegan appeals to the true meaning of religious faith, in this story’s case a Christian faith, to speak out against historical abuses and perversions.

Around Christmastime in 1980s Ireland, Bill Furlong, an orphan, merchant, and father, learns about a convent next door to him. It had always been whispered about, but firsthand, he newly sees the abuses. Though tempted to go along with the economic and religious workings of society, his conscience pangs him via a renewed self-understanding. He comes to realize that the only consistent thing to do is to act in a way consistent with the message of the season. He chooses compassion.

Ireland has Roman Catholicism strongly embedded into its culture. Because of historical oppression by the British, the church is deeply intertwined with society’s functioning. As with any culture, that mixing of politics and religion, however, is ripe for abuse by those interested in nefarious power. Keegan argues this viewpoint, present in recent decades, misses the very essence of Christianity.

This novella just got more and more intriguing until the last sentence. The prose is tightly constructed and meaningful. Although the events’ specifics are not historical, they speak to real issues in current events. This political aspect, however, only points to a larger, timeless theme. An attentive reader will be provoked about what Christmas is about and contemplate whether they themselves are offering their best humanity in the season. Well done! Since this is my first work of Keegan’s, I want to read more of her. My class will have a feast discussing this book. show less

After reading two other books by Claire Keegan over the past few weeks, I decided first, that I love this author and second, that I would take a little break because not all of her works were available at my public libraries or on Hoopla. I especially could not find this book, Foster, which is enjoying a new publication, so of course I became obsessed looking for it. And then, what do you know? The book showed up on NetGalley. No sooner had I requested it when I received an email from Grove show more Press offering me a copy for my honest review (talk about timing). So, first of all, my honest review. I loved the book and I love this author (one might have guessed since this was the THIRD book I read by her in as many weeks).

A young girl’s father drives her to the Kinsella farm in another town, where Mr. and Mrs. Kinsella have agreed to look after her for the summer until her pregnant mother gives birth to sibling #? (everyone has lost count). The young girl leaves the reader to believe that her mother would be happy for her to stay indefinitely, and she is clearly troubled by this. Her fear that she is unloved is validated by the fact that her mother is not affectionate by nature and rarely hugs or nurtures her other than the odd query whether she would like another pancake on a morning.

Mr. and Mrs. Kinsella take the time to parent her, include her almost completely in the family circle of friends, teaching and nurturing her in family chores, personal hygiene, values, and instructing her in the proper way to respond and converse, plying her with treats and affection that she has never experienced. The Young Girl clearly loved the routine, order and stability, and threw herself into the role with enthusiasm.

Watching the child’s emotional growth and development in just those few months where the Kinsella’s were devoted solely to her was captivating. She was so warmly treated that she dared to indulge herself in the fantasy of staying on and continuing in the role of “only” child in the Kinsella household.

We were offered a glimpse of the close-knit farming community where neighbors. including the Kinsella’s, reached out to help one-another….and also to gossip about one another.

It was interesting to watch how the child’s loyalties are naturally bestowed, on her family and how those loyalties manifested also in defense of the Kinsellas, who she came to love and view as surrogate parents.

So, How do I Love Thee Claire Keegan?

I love thee because your prose is beautiful
I love thee because the reactions of your characters are pitch perfect
I love thee because your stories are original, unsettling, and unexpected
I love thee because you are not sappy and make me cry, although your characters or the circumstances they find themselves in are often tragic
I love thee because you take me to places and times I have never visited (including emotionally and intellectually)
I love thee because you say what you have to say in 200+ pages or less (God Bless You. My patience and attention spans just that far)
I love thee for dozens more reasons, but I have to get dinner ready or 16 people will go hungry tonight…

Thank thee NetGalley and Grove Press for sharing this amazing book with me. I loved it. show less

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
One of the most explosively quiet novels I've ever read.
At 128 pages, it feels deceptively small—a coal merchant in 1985 Ireland discovers something terrible at a convent and makes a choice. That's it. Simple, spare, perfectly controlled.
But the more you sit with it, the larger the ripples become. Keegan doesn't shout or explain. She shows you a moment of moral crisis and lets you feel the weight of it. What does it cost to do the right thing? What does silence cost?
The show more prose is restrained, almost understated, but underneath there's this quiet devastation building. It's a book that feels small while you're reading it and then expands in your mind afterward, revealing more of itself the longer you think about it.
Explosively quiet. That's the only way to describe it. show less

Now I need a good cry.

This small novel is quiet and soft-spoken, like the protagonist Furlong himself. A beautiful, powerful work about a not beautiful time in Irish history, a history that lasted up until nearly the end of the 20th century, now exposed for what it really was.

Actually, it wasn't exclusively part of Ireland's history. My mother, now deceased, was sent to a "girls home" and orphanage in New Mexico, run by Good Shepherd nuns. She was just 12 and was sent there by my show more grandmother to keep her out of trouble. I suspect the trouble was her step-father. Her older sister, also a young teen, had just taken a job as a live-in babysitter for another family. Interesting.

My mother hated her time there, 200 miles from home, and hated the nuns who ran it. They were not kind and not good shepherds. Mom said she was hungry most of the time and would volunteer for washing pots and pans just to scrape a little more food from them. The meager food they were served was sometimes cabbage or potatoes, but mostly beans, and often the beans would be reheated until they began to go sour but still served to the children. The nuns straight away taught her to embroider. The nuns sold the girls' best embroidered handkerchiefs all over the world where they are now on display in museums. They also had a laundry. I guess my mother was spared that terrible labor being so young. But, truth is, there is much I don't know for certain because she seldom talked about that time.

Finally she was able to return home for a visit, when that older sister was killed in a tragic car crash, for her funeral. Before she could be shipped back to the girls home, she met the brother-in-law of a friend, a handsome 19 year old, and married him at just 14. She had escaped the girls home, and home home.

Many years later, in her late 50s, my mom made a solo pilgrimage to Los Cruses and had a long cry at, or maybe near, the original school site. Imagine. After all those years, she still had tears and trauma.

I would like to lay down some harsh words about the hidden histories of the Catholic Church but we all know the horrors too well now. Not a continent has been spared the trauma, not even a small New Mexico town, so proud of their "Good Shepherd" nuns. Reading Keegan's book, I've had my cry too, for my mom. She suffered life-long depression and while I was growing up she made several suicide attempts with subsequent hospitalizations that lasted months. I've carried those experiences also, all my life. I'm not laying this generational trauma all at the feet of the Catholic Church but clearly they knew they were not offering enlightened Christ-like love to my mother or any of the children there. How could they not know?

We all need a good cry. I hope Small Things Like These helps bring out cathartic tears for and by countless Irish, the Irish who suffered perhaps most under the many interlocked tyrannies of Church and State. show less