Will I love Small Things Like These?

This is a jewel box of a book. It seems simple but the more you ponder it, the more complex it becomes. A perfect book for the holiday season.

A short book with the weight of one that is goliath. One decent man, a cold town, and the price of looking away. Keegan’s sentences are incredibly clean, the courage quiet and costly. This entire story is the kind of moral flare I chase when I write about ordinary people standing in the deluge of history.

What a beautiful, devastating book. Keegan's writing is so sparse that it leaves nowhere to hide from the raw emotions that it evokes. I have spoken to several people who, like me, also thought at first they were reading a novel set in the more distant past. Discovering that it was set in 1985 made me feel both ignorant and horrified. Keegan writes about Ireland in the 80s and the life of girls in a Magdalene Laundry in a Convent.

The main character Bill is drawn so carefully, and he stays in my head still. As do the other characters,… show more.

The soft lilt of the voice and the mysterious melancholy the surrounds the main character, his own knowing and not knowing what he thinks he feels.

I've thought about the end of this book, about a family man whose job it is to distribute coal in Ireland and who does so to a Magdalene Laundry, so many times since reading it. The note Keegan lands on is so filled with beauty and hope. When I recall the final scene I have the abstract feeling that something has gone right.

This book is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.

I love the way this book looks.

I love holding it in my hand.

I love how the words fall perfectly on the pages.

When my good friend raved about a book by a new-to-me Irish writer, I hurried to buy it. And now I’m Keegan’s biggest fan. She writes short books that say so much. There’s history, complicated families, and unexpected turns. She has a talent for putting sentences together that make me want to read them over and over.

Another of her books, Foster, was made into a perfect movie, The Quiet Girl. Rarely do I think… show more.

Of all the Claire Keegan books I’ve read, this one haunted me the most.

I devoured it on a long plane ride and would have read it again if I didn’t need to disembark. It won awards for Keegan who set her yarn in a small Irish village in the 1980s but its mannerisms and mood harken back to the 1950s or 1940s or even earlier. The parallel, intertwining storylines show the optimism of a working-class family set against a web of dark, religious complexity.

Delivered with moral responsibility, Keegan’s words are beautifully stark and never preachy. Due to its… show more.

This is not much more than a novella, but very compelling. The story is set in Ireland in the early 80s during bad economic times, when the Magdalene convents were still going. The treatment of the young girls was horrific.

Furlong, the owner of a coal company, rescues one of the girls and the story ends. On first reading, it felt like the beginning of a novel, not the end of one, but in fact, you knew what the consequences were going to be, you knew that he could lose everything by what he did. It was complete as is.… show more.

This is a short but incredibly powerful novel. Its subject is the power and iron-fisted control the Catholic church has had for years over the Irish people, even in the face of corruption and abuse in church-run orphanages and homes for unwed mothers.

The book is also about the morality of a small town in which the local people fear speaking out against the abuses they know are being committed at the convent home for unwed mothers because of the possible repercussions for their own lives. But one man with a powerful conscience and daughters of his own risks his… show more.