
Thinking of selecting Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan) as one of your comparative texts for Leaving Cert English? This free two-page PDF guide tells you everything you need to decide.
Small Things Like These is little more than a hundred pages: a class can read it inside a week and read it again, which is rare and useful. It is home-turf material for an Irish classroom, a quiet moral drama built on the reality of the Magdalen laundries, with one of the most precise, nameable maps of power and silence on the list, and a suspended vision, dark about institutions and warm about individuals, that leaves the reader to decide whether the hope is justified. The guide is honest about where the small scale helps and where it costs.
Inside the guide: an at-a-glance table covering form, setting, narration, length, prescribed-list status and the novella’s strongest modes; a clear synopsis; the themes the novella carries; and an honest “before you teach” note on what needs care in the classroom and where the real teaching risk lies.
The guide then sets out how the novella pairs in every comparison mode at BOTH levels, partner-agnostic so it holds whatever you set it against:
- Higher Level: Cultural Context, Literary Genre, Theme or Issue, and General Vision and Viewpoint.
- Ordinary Level: Hero, Heroine and Villain; Relationships; Social Setting; and Theme.
The companion Student Textbook and Teacher Guide (full exam-ready analysis and complete teaching support) are available separately from The Prescribed Shelf, or together in the Complete Bundle.
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