alixcallender's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
Moderate: Forced institutionalization, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Misogyny, Sexism, Classism, and Abandonment
Minor: Abandonment and Child abuse
shoffschwelle's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Moderate: Pregnancy, Religious bigotry, Forced institutionalization, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Abandonment, and Classism
kcarney86's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
Graphic: Abandonment
Moderate: Forced institutionalization
Minor: Child abuse, Emotional abuse, and Classism
nialiversuch's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
Graphic: Abandonment, Child abuse, Confinement, Classism, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Religious bigotry, Forced institutionalization, and Grief
Minor: Cursing, Alcohol, Suicidal thoughts, Vomit, and Alcoholism
carlytenille's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Graphic: Confinement and Abandonment
bella_cavicchi's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
I texted my dad ahead of reading this for book club, and he responded: "Precision writing, beautiful use of understatement, moving story." I can't write a more accurate review than that.
Graphic: Forced institutionalization, Confinement, and Religious bigotry
Moderate: Abandonment, Child abuse, and Pregnancy
Minor: Death of parent
alisonannk's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Graphic: Child abuse, Confinement, Abandonment, Alcohol, Child death, Death, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Grief, and Suicidal thoughts
Minor: Slavery, Sexism, Kidnapping, Vomit, Torture, Excrement, Cancer, Physical abuse, Classism, Terminal illness, and Pregnancy
shelleyanderson4127's review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
Claire Keegan is that kind of writer. The pages of her slender novel Small Things Like These are full of the ordinary kindnesses and courtesies people show one another, whether they are married couples, neighbors, shopkeepers or passersby. A horrible historical cruelty is also shown, obliquely, and is the trigger for this examination of one ordinary person's conscience, and the steps that lead him to an act of courage and kindness.
The person is Bill Furlong, a hard working coal and timber merchant. The setting is a small Irish town in 1985, just before Christmas. Furlong was the illegitimate son of a maid. He has always wondered who his father was. Fortunately, his mother's employer decides to keep her on when the pregnancy is exposed. Furlong now has five daughters of his own. Approaching middle age, he increasingly asks himself what life, his life in particular, means.
While delivering coal to a convent he discovers a starving girl locked in a coal shed. With wonderful honesty and an eye for ordinary life, Keegan intimately traces the development of Furlong's sense of responsibility to others, to his family, and to himself.
The girl is one of the estimated 30,000 Irish women and girls imprisoned in Roman Catholic religious houses and forced to work in so-called Magdalen laundries. Often unmarried and pregnant, their babies were taken from them and adopted overseas. Many of the women and babies died of neglect. In the afterword, Keegan writes that a 2021 Commission Report found that 9,000 children died in just 18 of the institutions being investigated.
This is a gem of a novel, beautifully written and keenly felt. The questions Furlong struggles with are the same for all of us, questions that will increasingly demand answer in our difficult and uncertain time. We can hope that, like Furlong, the answers can be found in love for one another.
Moderate: Abandonment, Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, and Classism
sidneyreads_'s review
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.5
Moderate: Kidnapping and Trafficking
Minor: Death of parent, Abandonment, and Vomit
anyamcmurrer's review
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Moderate: Abandonment, Child abuse, and Emotional abuse