Foster

 The Guardian called [a:Claire Keegan|274817|Claire Keegan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1309920304p2/274817.jpg]'s Foster "A thing of finely honed beauty." The Sunday Times said it is "A Small Miracle," and there are three pages more inside and five blurbs on the back cover of high praise for this 88-page book. And the person who gave it to me did so with the eagerness of a zealot.
 I don't get. It's OK. It's a short novella about a little girl who goes to live with kindly relatives in rural Ireland for the summer while her pregnant mother—who already has so many kids she made me think of the Every Sperm is Sacred sketch in Monty Python's the Meaning of Life—and her getting used to it.
 A funny thing is that Keegan is cagey about when the novel takes place. Plastic abounds, and there are cars, but people a couple hours away communicate by letter and there's no mention of a telephone. There's also no reference to radios or televisions. At some point I started wondering if it were some kind of post-apocalyptic story.
Excerpt:

 Downstairs, she fetches the zinc bucket from the scullery and takes me down the fields. At first I feel uneasy in the strange clothes, but walking along I grow that bit easier. Kinisella's fields are broad and level, divided in strips with electric fences which she says I must not touch—unless I want a shock. When the wind blows, sections of the longer grass bend over, turning silver. On one strip of land, tall Friesian cows stand all around us, grazing. Some of them look up as we pass but not one of them moves away.