Foster by Clair Keegan

A gorgeous little novella! Read in a couple hours, but don't rush through it; the writing is wonderful!

Some snippets from the NYTimes review describe this perfect little book:

"The narrator is a young girl in rural Ireland who is sent by her parents to live with the Kinsella family while her mother, Mary, carries to term another child in a household already bustling with siblings. The Kinsellas, John and Edna, have no children of their own and will foster the girl on their small farm in Wexford, toward the southeastern coast of Ireland.

Keegan’s novella is a master class in child narration. The voice resists the default precociousness and walks the perfect balance between naïveté and acute emotional intelligence.

There is a sadness hovering over the Kinsella home, where “there is no sign, anywhere, of a child.” The girl senses a particular absence in the boy’s clothes she’s given to wear after a bath, and in the wallpaper of trains that covers her bedroom."

The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

We read this for Book Club and it was so well received by all of the women.  I was not as gung-ho.  The problem I had with the book was that it didn't delve as much into the history part as I would have liked.  The story was based on the fact that Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia, was shipwrecked and never found again.  From the NYTimes review:
 

Theodosia’s story is just one of two enigmatic plot lines in Michael Parker’s latest novel, “The Watery Part of the World.” The other is inspired by the real lives of the three last inhabitants of a barrier island in the Outer Banks, an attempt to explain what led these elderly people to abandon their homes and move to the mainland in the early 1970s.

Maybe I didn't give it enough attention; I was so busy at this time that I had trouble getting through it.