A review by booklywookly
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

5.0

This was a beautiful and a hopeful kind of fiction, set in 1980s in a small Irish town. The times are hard. Economic depression is setting in. People are moving to bigger cities in search of decent jobs. 

However, in the midst of all the gloom and hardships, the town is preparing for Christmas, and so is our protagonist and his family. He is pure of heart, sympathetic and gentle, exhibiting an almost Dickensian sentimentality who has a love for A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield.

At the edge of town is a convent with a training school for young women. The town is influenced by the church and something sinister is happening in those laundries. Anything beyond that would be a spoiler in this tiny novel but things happen, ugliness of these Magdalene laundries are revealed and tension is built whether or not our protagonist will act on his findings.

With a great deal of hope, quiet heroism, empathy, compassion, and elements of abundance in scarcity, this is without a doubt a proper Christmas read, something I wouldn’t mind reading once again on a cold Christmas night. 

Once criticism I have is on the decision to opt for a male hero, when all the characters being affected by whatever sinister was brewing inside the laundries are women.