Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful piece of work!
Review: Carol Shields is a magnificent writer who fully deserves every prize she has garnered, and many that have not been invented yet. Unless is as gripping and finely crafted as everything she has touched. Not an useless novel, but one that enhances your reading experience. I adore this author, and cannot comprehend the one stars here. I am hooked on Ms. Shields and I look forward to reading The Stone Diaries - for I've been told that the aforementioned novel is her best work thus far.
Rating: 
Summary: A Powerful Family Drama
Review: Carol Shields strikes a strong and powerful chord with her novel Unless. This family drama finds Reta Winters, a writer and mother of three, in despair when she finds out that her oldest daughter has dropped out of college and is sitting on a Toronto street corner with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads "Goodness." Reta struggles to try and understand what happened to put her daughter in such a state of despair, what has caused her to just give up. She uses her writing as therapy to try and help her and her daughter work through this and to try and get her daughter back. This is a heartfelt story about family struggles. As depressing as many parts of this story are, Shields manages to keep the reader involved. The emotions are strongly felt through Reta and her power struggle to fight for her daughter. Unless is strongly written and intermixes some lighter, humorous parts to lighten the load of the subject at hand. This story not only shows the emotional strain on Reta as a mother but also the hardship and pain it brings to a father and siblings to see a loved one in such a mental state leaving them to feel helpless.
Rating: 
Summary: Unless is Useless
Review: I bought this book for my mother, who thoroughly enjoyed reading it on her THIRD attempt to read the entire book. My mother passed it back on to me, after she finished, and raved about how wonderful the book was. She continues to encourage me to read on, but I just can't. The beginning of the book is just plain boring. I've only picked it up twice, in an attempt to read two chapters and I just can drudge through it! Nothing happens. After reading various other reviews, I'm sure Shield's novel is a wonderful story with a beginning, middle & end, but I just can't help but fall asleep trying to finish the beginning.
Rating:
Summary: Not a "real" review
Review: I'm not really about to write a review - I've never done this before, and I don't really know how to do it, especially in a foreign language (english is not my native language). But I felt an urge to share my own experience after reading some of other reviews:
All I would like to say is that I found this book amazing - I finished it in three days, literally couldn't put it down. I kept thinking about it while I was working, studying, shopping... I couldn't get it out of my mind, and I can't say why, but it had a certain "calming" effect on me.
"Unless" is certainly a very peculiar book, probably not something to read on the beach. It surely won't "speak" to everyone - but I believe it is a small masterpiece in its own field.
Rating:
Summary: Soon to be a major motion picture?
Review: Oddly, a few hours before I sat down to read the 2nd half of UNLESS, I was thinking of the weight of something said "in passing" in the first half: at the "coffee meeting" when the women are mentioning some horrible things that had happened in the news, one of them asks, essentially, "what have any of us done about these injustices?" The answer is, not much. So I found a real and valuable poignancy in the fact that the story actually pivots on an instance of action on the part of "goodness," a possibility never considered by anyone involved - nor by any reader, I'd imagine. To take completely seriously the feminist angle of the narrator's journey is to miss the point that the narrator has missed the point! She seems to figure that out at last. And she also knows, as does Carol Shields, that the neat, momentary "resolution" of loose strands at the last page of any story is at best a snapshot. Or, as Orson Welles said, "Happy endings depending on stopping the story before it's over.
Rating: 
Summary: Unless. Tedious.
Review: I admit, I thought this book would be something else when I bought it, after skimming the back cover - a novel ("with a beginning, middle, and end") about the effects of a 19 year old girl's emotional breakdown on the people who love her. Unfortunately for me, Norah's desertion of her family to become a homeless panhandler was given very little attention - instead, it served as a springboard for Reta's musings on goodness, and, primarily, feminism. I certainly consider myself a feminist; however, I was put off by the implication that all of society's ills are a result of women feeling incapacitated. Reta believes her daughter has come to this because she feels insignificant? All right, then instead of writing those tedious "letters to the editor" about the lack of mention of women's achievements in a newspaper article or book or lecture, DO SOMETHING about your daughter! If you think she needs to see that women can accomplish something, show her that her own mother has some backbone - haul her off the street corner and get her the psychiatric help she needs! This is not my only problem with the novel, however. My other complaint is simply this: it's dull. While the author has some interesting thoughts on the notion of goodness and some valid points about women's struggle to achieve greatness, these come few and far between. The remaining 300 pages consist of far too many laborious descriptions of Reta's house and daily rituals, a numbered list of writings she has published in her career, and of course, those repetitive letters to authors and journalists. Other family members (her husband and two younger daughters) are introduced and then virtually vanish - we never learn how THEY feel about Norah. Only Reta's mother in law gets an interesting backstory, and that comes in the final pages - far too late to redeem the rest of the book. Other readers have defended the plodding pace and lack of character development by explaining 'that's just what Carol Shields DOES'. Gotcha. Great for you if you enjoy Ms. Shields' style; I just didn't.
Rating:
Summary: Goodness
Review: How often do you start reading a book and find you can't put it down, have to keep reading and wish it didn't end? Carol Shields has written such a book for me- the jacket describes this book as an author with family issues one of which is a daughter who quits college to become homeless. Sounds depressing, but this book is anything but..Reta Winters is an author trying to write her second book while helping an older author translate her stories. In the midst of her professional work, family life intervenes, and the story of Reta's daughter becomes the focus for family and personal change. Reta is a feminist and her friends and colleagues are involved with the feminist movement to improve the life of women. Reta, her husband, and two youngest daughters are keeping the errant daughter in their lives through daily pryaers, thoughts and bags of cheese sandwiches left at the site where the daughter sits day after day with a sign, "Goodness" and collects monies given to her by stangers. The mother-in-law and Reta's editor provide some unusual insights. This is a story that surprises, delights and ends on an up note that gives us all hope for goodness in our own lives....."unless"...
Rating: 
Summary: Nicely written but not much in it
Review: Carol Shields writes beautifully using words to convey her feelings about her grieving. However, nothing really happens in the story, you feel like you're just reading her journal entries which amount to nothing. We don't see her change or evolve. I forced myself to finish reading since Carol Shields is an acclaimed writer (I didn't read her previous book Stone Diaries) and because I hoped something would happen, emotionally or plot-wise, but nothing - I was disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and beautiful
Review: This is the best book I have ever read - or at least in a long while. To spend time with Carol Shields is not to read but to massage and survey the soul. So many times you think she's telling your story, and at others you gaze in awe of this testament, with its unadorned, unassuming, unresting way of creating art in literature. Narrative? yes but not explicit. Fiction? yes, but this is the kind of book you continue to hear after you put it down and you're cleaning your kitchen, smiling at your partner, or passing someone; you can still feel its words when you're writing your own. You love her daughter. You take a stroll in Georgetown. Carol Shields knows how to write life. I haven't read anyone who can do it better.
Rating:
Summary: A Writer With Nothing to Write Writes
Review: On page 40 of Unless, Carol Shields' heroine notes: "I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax." Then why mention it? This is a book by an author with a contract who has no inspiration. She sits around her desk, looks here and there, and writes. The writing is fine but tedious. The subject is boring. I finally stopped at page 40. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason for this tome. If you liked Carol Shields' other books and want her to be happy, just send her the money directly and don't waste your time as she has.
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