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.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. In this strange new place vegetables grow in abundance, the cows are heavy with milk and the well never runs dry. 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". 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. 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
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