![]() ![]() This is a story about liminal spaces: about having "room, and time to think", about the shifting lines between secrecy and shame, and a child's burgeoning apprehension of the gap between what must be explicit and what need merely be implied. Keegan's lyrical novella was originally a New Yorker short story, but it has gained greatly from this expansion: the narrative breathes along with the child slowly detaching from her cramped, impoverished home and starting to unfurl, leaf-like, in an atmosphere of attentiveness. Small Things Like These is an ideal title for this exquisite novella in which Claire Keegan closely attends to the daily life of a modest County Wexford coal vendor. ![]() Moreover, adults evince a concern for children beyond merely setting them to earn their keep, leaving our small visitor "in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be". In this strange new place vegetables grow in abundance, the cows are heavy with milk and the well never runs dry. A hot summer and a young, unnamed girl is taken to stay with an unfamiliar couple on a Wexford farm while at home her reluctantly pregnant mother makes ready for yet another mouth to feed. ![]()
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