First Impressions: Foster by Claire Keagan

This is my favorite couplet/ verse/ message from the Tao Te Ching - Even if a house has four walls, you live within the empty space. That even if a pot has beautiful curvature or is made of either humble materials or premium enamel, the water is stored in the empty space. The emptiness is what contains. In a way, the emptiness is the point. (I am rewording this. There are more elegant explanations elsewhere.)

Foster is the story of love that spreads and spools in exactly such a place. 

We follow the story of a young girl who is unnamed in the novel. I find that detail to be enormous because she goes through such momentous internal shifts that it makes the first marker of identity, like a name, feel like a footnote.

The young girl is left at her aunt's place for a bit because her own parents are not well off financially, and they are expecting their third or fourth child. The new foster parents, Kinsellas, are grappling with their own sorrow. They lost their young sun to drowning in a nearby lake. 

With this girl, they are warm, welcoming, sometimes a little stern, and always fully loving. There's a part in the book where this girl has returned from church with a nosy neighbor who tells her about the Kinsella's dead child. Our protagonist does not know of it until then. Then later, after she is told of this, the child connects the dots - a strange look when she dresses up in boy's clothes that she finds in the cupboard, the bedroom decorated with cute wallpaper even though there's no child around, etc. 

That evening, the father takes this girl atop a hill, near the lake. And as they are standing there, looking around at a world going silent, he puts his arms around her and brings her in his fold. She belongs now.

The story doesn't end here. But this moment, the writing of this moment - is so sad, complete, fulfilling, and wholesome that you don't mind if the book ended here. Anything after this is a beautiful continuum. (And it does have a slightly open end.) When the foster parents drop her off at her real parents and are about to drive off, she runs out and hugs this man and calls him "Daddy". We don't know if the foster parents adopted her or anything. But we know that a child finally understood what it means to be loved by a family - in a way she understands.

There are many ways the book breaks your heart. It's like the way a child breaks your heart. The unflinching gaze at the truth. You are weak, you are flawed, you try to put up something so that the child will not know - but the child knows. More than knows, understands. More than understands, accepts. And more than accepts, becomes.

The unbecoming is the triumph we see in Foster.