47 pages • 1 hour read
Claire KeeganFoster
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This text includes references to death of a child, implied parental abuse and neglect, and separation of a foster child from their preferred family.
The novella opens after a Sunday Mass as the unnamed narrator’s father drives her to Wexford County where her mother’s relatives live. They pass a village in which the father gambled away one of the family’s cows. The first-person narration reveals the girl’s thoughts as she watches the summer sky and imagines several versions of her future life at the Kinsellas’ farm. Once they arrive, the narrator notices her reflection in the gleaming windows of the house looking “wild as a tinker’s child” (5). The farm’s hound dog barks, and John Kinsella (referred to as Kinsella) comes outside. Kinsella and the girl’s Da discuss the lack of rain and farming costs while Edna Kinsella, referred to by the narrator as the woman, emerges to embrace her visitor. Edna notes that she hasn’t seen the girl since she was a baby, but the conversation stalls as the narrator notices an unusual wind blowing.
The woman takes the narrator into a welcoming kitchen, takes a rhubarb tart out of the oven, and asks after the child’s mother, Mary, who is very pregnant. The girl talks about when her mother won a small amount of money from the lottery. She is cast into a memory of her parents discussing the length of her fosterage and her father saying that the Kinsellas should keep her for as much time as they wish. In answer to a question, she tells Edna that the hay has not yet been cut on her family’s farm. The two men come in for lunch, and Da lies and says that they’ve already harvested the hay, which prompts the narrator to feel uncomfortable. Kinsella lays out the food, which Da awaits eagerly and then serves himself without using the serving implements set out. Over the meal, Da expresses that his daughter has a big appetite, “but [they] can work her” (12). Kinsella replies that she won’t have to do anything but help with house chores.
Da gets ready to leave, and Edna gives him fresh rhubarb to take to his wife. As the car drives away, the narrator wonders why her father didn’t say goodbye and notices that the same “strange, ripe breeze that’s crossing the yard feels cooler now” (15). Edna announces that Da left without giving them the girl’s belongings, though it is unclear whether the child even had a bag. Edna and her husband are certain that they have clothes for their new charge, and the woman says that it’s time for a bath.
Chapter 2 Summary
On the way to the bath, the girl notices the Kinsellas’ bedroom and is pleased to see that they share a bed, though she doesn’t know why. Once in the tub, the narrator thinks about how different this deep water is from the small amount of water her mother uses to bathe both her and her siblings. At first, the water is too hot, but the girl acclimatizes to it. She is filthy enough that Edna has to use tweezers to get the dirt out from under her fingernails. Edna’s hands feel like her mother’s, but the narrator feels “something else in them too, something [she has] never felt before and [has] no name for” (18).
After dressing the girl in slightly oversized clothes that she pulls from a drawer, Edna invites her charge to go to the well with her. The offer strikes the narrator strangely, and she asks if the trip is a secret, to which the woman responds that there are no secrets in this house as secrets mean shame. This makes the narrator want to cry, and she reflects that she’d rather be at home where there are no surprise unknowns. The two take a metal bucket through the well-tended fields to the well, not speaking. Edna encourages the girl to take a drink of well water. She does, held by the belt so she won’t fall in, and sees that her reflection looks clean and tidy, unlike her appearance when she arrived. The water is “cool and clean as anything [the girl has] ever tasted” (23), and the narrator wishes that this place were her home.
As it is high summer, at bedtime there is still daylight, but the narrator asks Edna not to put up a curtain because she is afraid of the dark. Edna asks why the girl’s family hasn’t harvested the hay yet and learns that it is due to lack of funds to pay the workers. Edna then asks if Mary would be offended by receiving a little money from the Kinsellas, and the narrator decides that her mother wouldn’t be but her father would. Left to sleep, the girl notices that the wallpaper of the room is covered in trains with a boy waving in some places. She thinks about the difference between the Kinsellas and the family she’s left behind, before getting up to try (ineffectually) to use the chamber pot. Hours later, the girl pretends to be asleep when Edna comes to the side of the bed and says that she’d never put a child of hers in a stranger’s home.
Chapter 3 Summary
When the girl wakes up in the morning, she’s wet the bed. When Edna notices, the narrator expects to be sent home, but instead the woman blames the old mattress for “weeping” and takes it outside to clean it. She yells at the hound when it tries to urinate on the mattress. That gets the attention of Kinsella, who goes along with the old mattress explanation. Saying that it is to make up for a bad beginning together, Edna makes them all a hearty meal, and the girl helps. As they eat, Kinsella mentions that, according to the morning news, another hunger striker has died.
The narrator spends the rest of the day learning the woman’s exacting domestic habits and how to help. Kinsella comes in from his fields and sends the girl to get the mail at the end of their street, insisting that she go at a run. He times her and, when she returns, tells her that it wasn’t a bad first effort. They go through the mail; the girl notices that there is nothing in her mother’s handwriting, and Kinsella playfully asks if she thinks the letters contain money or a wedding invitation. He tells the narrator that she should try for a better run time tomorrow and that “by the time [she’s] ready for home [she’ll] be like a reindeer” (34).
After dinner, Edna eats a little dry Weetabix, a kind of shredded wheat cereal that comes in palm-sized pieces, explaining that it’s a secret way to get a good complexion. She gives the narrator some and watches as the girl eats five, while the evening news discusses recent horrific events in the background. After tucking the narrator into bed, the woman cleans her foster child’s ears and finds so much wax that she asks if the girl’s mother ever does such cleaning. The narrator is defensive, and Edna agrees that with so many children, Mary must not have time. The next morning, the girl is surprised to wake in a dry bed. Edna is pleased, remarking that the narrator’s complexion has already improved.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The primary function of these opening three chapters is exposition, particularly regarding the conditions of the narrator’s biological family home as compared to those of the Kinsellas’ home, thus introducing the theme of Healing Through Found Family. Da is prominent in Chapter 1 as he offers the clearest window into the girl’s previous life. The first hint of his character is that he gambled away the family’s “red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five” (3), a tremendous financial loss for a rural farm. “It grows momentarily dark” when the men join Edna Kinsella and the girl in the kitchen (9), introducing light as a motif by casting father figures as the source of a darkness. Once inside, Da “lies about the hay” (10), not realizing that the girl has already told the truth to Edna, and uses his personal fork to put pickled beets on his plate where it “stains the pink ham” (13). All of this paints him as a brutish type, especially when taken with his exhortation to make his daughter work hard to earn her keep. This portrait coalesces in Chapter 5 when the narrator is afraid of John Kinsella’s temper, signifying that her biological father can be violent. Moreover, when Edna takes her to the well, the girl understands the unspoken emotion in the woman’s voice as meaning that the trip should be a secret. “Am I not supposed to tell?” the girl asks (20), implying that she is used to her mother hiding things from her father. The indirect hints about the girl’s previous home life emulate the experience of a young child experiencing but not fully understanding their domestic circumstances.
There are other hints that the narrator comes from a place of neglect and scant resources. Her awareness of her appearance is one, as she sees her “thin, cotton dress, [and her] dusty sandals through [Edna’s] eyes” (7). In an example of childlike enumeration, the girl thinks, too, about how her mother never stops working, from “the buttermaking” to “stretching the money and setting the alarm” (13). While bathing, the narrator describes the water as “deeper than any [she has] ever bathed in” (18). Through the depth of the water, Keegan characterizes the Kinsella household as one of abundance and care. Edna cleaning the girl echoes Catholic baptism rites to signify a rebirth for the girl.
The comparisons between the two households echo the narrator’s early daydreaming of what the unknown Kinsella household will be like. The two poles of her visions are prosperity and scarcity: a man who will buy her “red lemonade and crisps” (potato chips) versus a man who will make her “clean out sheds” and a living space with “an outhouse or an indoor bathroom with a toilet and running water” (4). The simple, binary thinking emphasizes her childlike understanding of domestic difficulties.
The girl is characterized as frightened and reactive. Edna’s reaction to her question about the well visit being a secret prompts the narrator almost to tears, suggesting that she associates even mild corrections with hurt. Similarly, after wetting the bed, the child wants “to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over” (28), anticipating complete rejection as the result of an involuntary action. Yet this is an early example of the Kinsellas’ compassion and kindness, as Edna saves the narrator from admitting to shame by pretending that it is due to the old mattress “always weeping” (28). The woman also takes action to avoid another incident in future, giving her Weetabix “not with milk in a bowl but dry” (34). When the narrator wakes in an unsoiled bed, the timing of Edna’s comment that the girl’s “complexion is better already” confirms that the Weetabix was to absorb water in the child’s system (36).
Edna’s words and the final lines in Chapter 3, “All you need is minding” (36), capture the Kinsellas’ approach as caregivers. “Minding” requires attention, thoughtfulness, and some discipline, the last of which takes the form of routine in this household. It is notable that Edna does not hint at love here, as she is already on her guard by Chapter 3. In the first chapter, Edna calls the girl “a Leanbh” (8), meaning “my child,” a term derived from the type of bread baked for a new mother. This reinforces the associations of their budding relationship with nurturing domesticity and abundance. She also addresses the narrator as “Girleen” (16), a playful portmanteau of “girl” and “colleen,” an Irish word that is the diminutive of a word meaning woman. These two terms function as endearments, but Edna does not repeat them, putting emotional distance between herself and the narrator in an example of The Power of the Unspoken.
The wind plays a significant role in symbolizing the girl’s feelings in these chapters. First, she notices that “a queer, ripe breeze is crossing the yard” in her first interaction with Edna (7), signifying her sense of change but also potential. The word “ripe” also connects to the discussions of harvest and food in this section, further highlighting the girl’s associations of her new household with relative abundance. This same wind “feels cooler” later, suggesting that the girl begins to acclimatize to her surroundings. This symbol is crucial to the emotional life of the text, as the girl struggles to articulate her thoughts and feelings. For example, upon seeing the Kinsellas’ bed, she is “glad, for some reason, that they sleep together” (17), unable to realize the connection between her feelings and her circumstances. She becomes frustrated by her lack of comprehension, which she expresses in Chapter 2 by wishing she “was back at home so that all the things [she does] not understand could be the same as they always are” (21). The narrative reflects her confusion about her world by leaving things unexplained or hinted at, such as the Weetabix and her home life.
Furthermore, reflecting the narrator’s childish perspective, these chapters also introduce the dramatic irony that influences the first half of the novella. Alongside the Weetabix and the encouragement to run, the most significant example pertains to the unspoken existence of the Kinsellas’ dead son. Keegan portrays several pieces of evidence that the Kinsellas used to have a son, particularly the poetic presence on the wallpaper of “a small boy stand[ing] off in the distance” and the clothes that the Kinsellas give the child (26). The narrator’s ignorance of the dead child is an overarching instance of dramatic irony that propels the novella to its midpoint and Mildred’s proclamation.
