Rating: 
Summary: An elegantly spare title.....
Review: ...that captures the essence of Carol Shields last novel. An ordinary family living life and finding it full of joy and quiet reward...unless. Mining afresh the way lives intertwine and the effects of one person's choices on others, the author draws us into this family as they grapple with the unexplained withdrawal of their daughter. We all must deal with the reality of reasonable expectations bumping up against unexpected and unwelcome outcomes. Shields is masterful at conveying Rita's agonized bewilderment--the questioning, the grief, the distracted, automatic functioning in her "normal" life, while on another level her whole world is in pieces. I have to confess to being a little let down by the ending as I found the wrap up disappointingly neat and abrupt. I was looking forward to Shields grappling with the concept that sometimes there are no answers...I thought that's where she might be going. Still, a powerfully absorbing book...we've lost a great writer.
Rating: 
Summary: A Carol Shields Mystery Story
Review: Carol Shields writes about people coming to terms with life, facing the unfaceable. Ordinary people being heroic, especially women in this new century who are handicapped in the pursuit of greatness by a cultural wall that questions their abilities.
"Unless" is a mystery story. Author Reta Winters faces the unfaceable: why does her college-student daughter Norah occupy a Toronto street corner with a sign around her neck that reads "Goodness"? She sits in the cold and rain and snow an hour's drive from home, providing no answers as to why she's there. Winters believes the answer, in fact, is connected with that handicap and tortures herself with recrimination. The internal debate rages, but not without real discovery and Shields's humor on the stickiness of life. Reta's pilgrimage touches everyone she contacts, from the editor of Winters's novel to total strangers she accosts through the mail. But even in the darkest day of an Ontario winter, Reta moves toward an equilibrium based on family and love and life's small graces. She, her husband Tom and two remaining daughters, never let go of Norah as they live their own full lives. Reta, herself, is writing a novel through the grief; she meets long-standing friends who field her constant observations; and she translates poems by the famous French author and feminist Danielle Westerman. Shields tackles the question of "goodness" not like a linebacker, but with words that stick in the mind for use in anyone's life. Her last book must have been difficult. Shields had so much to say in so little time. Cancer robbed her of her horizon. But she hits her targets, steers us to wisdom and makes us laugh. Quite a legacy.
Rating: 
Summary: Unless
Review: I read this book because of recommendations and hype. UNLESS you have all kinds of time,,,don't bother,,,however, there are a few interesting pages so if you really are curious and don't mind a bit of torture, then by all means struggle through
Rating: 
Summary: Mother & Daughter adjustment problems
Review: Shields beautifully lays out the dilemma of parents whose offspring totally reject the expected paths and drop out. They embrace a circle of society foreign to their family. This mother, herself a writer of sorts, manipulates, bargains and grieves what she perceives as the loss of her daughter. She grieves and obsesses to the point I lost interest and didn't finish the book.
Rating:
Summary: A subtle, lovely and moving book
Review: I must say that the nastiness of many of the reviews here shocks me. I loved reading this book, and even if I didn't I could not see being so comtemptuous and arrogant of an author or her work. I'm a writer and so I found the way the protagnist presented herself, by discussing a chronology of her writing, very funny and telling and REAL. The story of what happened to the daughter Norah comes out slowly and poignantly--it's as if talking about it is so painful for the author that it only comes out in bits and snatches, which seems both very realistic and effective, slowly building suspense. The language is beautiful and the commentary about writing, editors, book tours, book awards, and the fobiles of one and all was hilarious. So were some of the angry letters about sexism in advertising and various publications--these just kept getting more and more outrageous, bitter, funny, and sad. If I have a complaint, it's that the heroine was a little too idealized (the slender, successful, lucky, prolific doctor's wife with several steadfast good friends), and that it didn't seem quite true-to-life to me that someone in her forties could be such a stranger to tragedy for so long. Even the explanation of why Norah had been away had something of this "we're perfect" feel to it, which put me off a little. And the way the author kept her pain (and other people?) at bay resulted in a sense that we didn't really get to know or see the other characters as much as I would have liked. All in all, though, it was a moving and engrossing read, beautifully written--just not perfect. I wanted to pick four and a half stars.
Rating:
Summary: What a mother knows
Review: A mother knows nothing about what her child is thinking but she also knows everything. This book tore at my heart. The powerlessness of a mother and father in the face of an unexplainable act by their oldest daughter, the solidarity of her sisters as they join their sibling at her corner every Saturday, the respecting of boundries set by Nora while offering her tools and gifts for her journey. Reta, the mother, knew there is a battle still to be fought for the full recognition of women and she believed Nora was immobilized by that battle. Reta came to realize that that was actually her personal battle with the world but didn't realize how deeply and totally it was also her daughter's. Shields description of the questions of children is magnificent.
"A child is suspended in a locked closet of unknowing, within the body's borders, that dark place. To name a perplexity is to magnify it. At the same time-I recognized the calumny for what it is-children's natural observations are often thought to be whimsical, even adorable, and their sayings, their mild queries, much quoted and smiled over, but there is no guarantee of an answer. Whey do children risk disclosure at all? It must be out of desperation or unsupportable fear. It's a wonder they don't throw themselves out of windows in fits of confusion."
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