Small Things Like These
- Aug 16, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 22
★★★★★
Given as a gift by a friend with the encouragement to read it near the Christmas holiday, we put this book on the shelf, expecting to ignore it for many months. However, when we saw a trailer for the movie adaptation, and wanting to see that adaptation sooner rather than later, Megan and I both moved this book right up to the top of our lists. I went first. Megan followed quickly after. When she was done, she wanted to, of course, discuss it, but I asked her to refrain. I wanted to read it again. After clearing the decks during a recent solo getaway to Indiana, I reread Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These in a day, which is, I think, the best—maybe the only way—to read it properly.
At 128 pages, Small Things Like These is a very short novel. In many circles, it might be considered a novella. Short novel, very long short story, novella: It matters not. What matters is that it is perfection on the page. Ostensibly about the Catholic Church’s Magdalen laundries in Ireland that concealed, incarcerated, and forced into labor tens of thousands of women and girls for more than 200 years (shockingly, the last laundry wasn’t shuttered until 1996), this is no exposé or true crime novel. Rather, it is a quiet meditation on quiet lives and what possibilities exist when we choose not to keep our heads down and worry only about our own.
There is a quietude, and a loneliness, suffused throughout that feels quintessentially Christmas. Too, there is a hopefulness and a timelessness that is also quintessentially Christmas. With clear, clean, precise prose, Keegan has tapped into the complex and myriad emotions that swirl for many at the holidays. In Small Things Like These, she has created a classic, one that haunts and lingers, gnaws and yearns, begs to be read, to be inhabited, again and again and again.
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