Rating: 
Summary: Read Nick Hornby's How To Be Good Instead
Review: I agree totally with the last reviewer. Sheild's is a very talented writer but this book just wandered on and on and then tied up everything in a neat bow at the end. I found it totally unsatisfying, there was just not enough of a story to support a novel it should have been a short story instead. For a much funnier read about what it means to be "good" read Nick Hornby's How To Be Good. 2 1/2 stars out of 5.
Rating: 
Summary: Unless - Carol Shields
Review: It's hard to believe that this foolish little book came from the same woman who wrote "The Stone Diaries", a book with nuance and depth, a sense of history, well-developed characters (are those really family photos, or a clever literary device?), and an abundance of nearly poetic prose, a book deservedly honored with the Pulitzer (even if she IS a woman, poor thing!). But shortly after I began "Unless", I was so struck with its flimsiness and stridency within the first few chapters that I was not only reminded of the feminist excesses of Marilyn French (who was, for all her overwrought single-mindedness, at least attempting to illuminate serious issues), I also had to stop and go back to re-reading "Stone Diaries" to remind myself that this really IS an author who has something to say about life in a genuinely artful way...which gave me enough optimism to think that maybe, just maybe, she had something more in store for us than weekly coffee-klatsches with her aging girlfriends, scrubbing her floors, and agonizing over her daughters' prospects.for greatness. But no; not only did it NOT rise to any occasion whatsoever, it declined rapidly into vapid prose and even less insight. Has she simply forgotten that there isn't a lot of greatness to go around out there, male OR female? And even though her characters in "Stone Diaries" ascend to unexpected heights from humble beginnings, which I found a bit of an allowable stretch forgiveable in context, wasn't "ordinary lives" pretty much the premise? "Unless" is a mishmash of idle chatter among women, poorly-drawn and under-developed characters, no real plot whatsoever, and an absurd and impossible denoument : we're supposed to believe that the parents of a 19-year-old girl have "allowed" her to sit catatonic on a freezing street corner for months, in a complete departure from her normal behavior, without someone taking some kind of action to find out WHY in any useful way, and that the girl herself does not offer anything more than vague hints for her distress in all that time? That her fond grandmother, who lives right next door, has become withdrawn instead of offering any suggestions regarding the situation, and is revealed in the last couple of pages to have known something all along, but hasn't mentioned it because "nobody asked her?! Are we to assume that her peripheral character was meant as an example of the elderly woman who is generally ignored unto invisibility?
And if the body of the work seemed silly, with its superficial emotional overtones of lament for unrecognized female accomplishment and its stereotypical attempt to lampoon the (possibly) male-oriented publishing industry, the ending was downright absurd...and boy did Ms. Shields ever rush through THAT in a page or two with a ridiculously unbelievable juxtapositioning of world events and teenage angst! Tired, honey? Want to get this book out of the way and try something with a little substance? Everything about this story was so thin, irresponsibly aggrieved, and appallingly tepid that I have to wonder if Ms. Shields simply has no more to say...she may well wonder if the novel is a useless, ephemeral art form indeed...at least it certainly was in this case. Whatever she was trying to do with her ongoing "fluff-novel within a serious-novel" motif, she missed her objective ...badly. So, fellow-readers out there (sorry, can't think of a feminist expression for the literary sisterhood): don't waste your money or your time on this one. If you HAVE to read it for your book club (or you have a fascination with REALLY BAD books), borrow it at the library...and if it happens to be checked out, I'm sure you'll find it back on the shelves in no time at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: This is one of the better books I have read in quite some time. Very womanish and interiorly oriented. The Protagonist's husband is very one dimensional and it got a little annoying that he kept going out to his trilobite meetings. There is some ranting and raving but mostly it is very low key and intense. According to Shields women are only called to "goodness" not "greatness" not only by men but by other women. This central point is demonstrated with clarity and verve but little subtelty. I liked the book immensely.
Rating: 
Summary: The Mind of a Mother in Grief
Review: Reta Winters, a writer, has three delightful daughters, a faithful husband who is a family doctor, and a seven-year-old golden retriever named Pet. They live in a small town in Ontario in a 100-year-old farmhouse with an apple orchard, raspberry patch, and separate rooms for each of the three girls. Theirs is an affluent, unremarkable, middle class life, until the oldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Norah, goes missing and is found, uncommunicative, panhandling on a street corner in Toronto with a sign that reads "goodness." Norah has abruptly and inexplicably withdrawn from the world refusing to talk to her parents, sisters or boyfriend. Written in the first person narrative, Reta escorts the reader through a mother's daily routines under the dark cloud of a disconnected daughter. Each of her women friends and acquaintances express support and their unique insight for hopeful resolution. There is little Reta can do though. Once a week she drives to Toronto with food and clothes for a daughter that refuses to acknowledge her presence, so Reta spies on her from nearby stores. At home, she carefully sweeps the cellar stairs, as if getting the dirt out of the corners will somehow enlighten the shadow that has befallen her offspring. The timeless anguish of motherhood is palpable. Shortly before Norah disappears, she laments to her mother over the immensity of the world, about her struggle to get past the little things. She says "I'm trying to find where I fit in." Given Reta's feminist perception of the world, she believes that her daughter's malignancy is founded in the exclusion and powerlessness of women, that despite "having come so far," they've been snookered into the side pocket. Through Reta and her mentor Danielle Westerman, an aged literary feminist, Shield splatters her story with the female grievance, about the male power play and the non-recognition of women etc. It's not a hard sell though. Reta drafts letters criticizing male writers for excluding females from their lists of achievers, yet she never mails them. And in her ending, Shield wags her finger at the shrillness of Reta's complaint. If you are a reader accustomed to being hooked in the first paragraph and reeled in by the end of chapter one, a reader who believes that a novel is first and foremost story and that style is irrelevant, you might be disappointed with Unless. Only Shield's strong prose and your faith that she'll get to some point will carry you to chapter two. This novel was not written to entertain. Indeed, Danielle Westerman chides Reta "for the unworthiness of novel writing." Reta is inclined to agree: "...what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes...UNLESS they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they're just so much narrative crumble" (emphasis is mine). Unless is not narrative crumble. It is the last word of an accomplished author with five children and terminal cancer. Unless did more than take me inside the mind of a mother in grief. It made me wonder whether we are so trapped by our history that, in the end, we are uncertain who we are and what we have done.
Rating:
Summary: What a Wonderful Book!
Review: Carol Shields explores so many relationships in this novel that it is hard to take them all in with just one reading. She examines the friendships of women, the concerns of a mother for a troubled daughter, the relationships of husband to wife, of wife to mother-in-law, of daughter to mother, even of writer to the characters that she creates. And then, along with all that, she contemplates the moral and political complexities of modern life within a story that is graced with humor, sorrow, wit, friendship, outrage and love. The plotting is elegant, the story line is compelling, and the ending comes with a fine little twist. Excellent!
Rating:
Summary: Addendum
Review: After reading the review by "A Reader from the USA," I must add to my own review an objection. As another reviewer here notes, "USA" made numerous mistakes in her tirade, even more than were caught. USA" in fact, has not written a review, but a personal attack on Ms. Shields for NOT writing precisely what USA thinks she "should" write. What chutzpah! USA demands that Sheilds write only about the elderly, since she imagines that the author is older than she is! Even if she were, every writer has the right to write about any subject she chooses. Has USA never heard of imaginative experience? If she so much needs to see a book written about her own pet topics, then USA ought to write one--she will soon enough discover how difficult it is to write a novel as beautiful and compelling as "Unless."
Rating:
Summary: Carol Shields Revives an Old Revered Genre
Review: I haven't read a book like Carol Shields' new novel "Unless" in something like 30 years. This is a novel that reminds us how intensely true is the old feminist adage that "the personal is political." Through her believable and likable narrator and the women in her life, Shields continually makes connections between the tragedy of one teenage woman's circumstances and the global powerlessness of women. Shields is refreshingly insistent in her view that women are just as powerless now, despite surface appearances to the contrary, as they were back in the day. This book touched me on a deeply personal level. It pushed me into a week-long state of the famous "Click!" (if you don't know what a Click! moment is--and it's got nothing to do with computers-- I suggest that you read this book, and then every feminist novel published from roughly 1965 through 1978.) Suffice it to say that there's nothing like a "Click!" to pull a woman out of the isolated individual doldrums and into a state of collective rage. Rage, we are repeatedly told these days, isn't good for our health; but as Marge Piercy noted in an old poem, "A just anger' acted upon is as healthy as apples and carrots. I have one critical reservation about "Unless," and that's the ending. I found the resolution of the daughter's situation entirely too pat. We don't actually get to see a happy ending on the page, but we know it's coming. If the world really is as oppressive to women as Shields seems to think--and I agree with her that it is--the individual solution, especially of the nuclear family happily-ever-after variety, is an impossible dream.
Rating:
Summary: Well done tale of disillusion and loss
Review: 'Unless' is the story Reta Winters, a so-called light novelist who has never truly had to endure hardship or disappointment. She has lived in quiet content, satisfied that while her life is not perfect it is far from unbearable. All that changes when her oldest daughter inexplicably drops out of college and begins living in a homeless shelter, refusing her families' urgings for her to return home. Now Reta is struggling to go on with her life in a world she no longer understands and feels an intense anger toward. The story is not perfect; one or two characters are somewhat exaggerated (for example Arthur Springer, Reta's hands-on editor), and the story is just slightly jumbled at times. But the overall impression the book leaves is a good one. Shields' prose is delicate and intricately crafted, weaving an enjoyable story that moves quickly and takes hold of the reader. While it may not be the best book of the year it certainly comes close.
Rating:
Summary: a little gift of a book
Review: I realize it's generally a bad idea to comment on other people's reviews, however, after reading the review "Who are these people" by "a reader in the USA" I feel I absolutely MUST comment. First of all, the writer describes Carol Shields as a writer in her seventies. She is, in fact, in her early sixties. The writer also says that Carol Shields, as a novelist housewife, can't imagine the working world. Apparently the review writer is not aware that Ms. Shields taught and administered for years at various universities, most notably the University of Winnipeg, where she worked for many years. I felt compelled to comment on these over-sights as so much of the review writer's objections to "Unless" seemed to be what the writer considered Ms. Shield's lack of qualifications to actually write the book, rather than the content of the book itself. Most of us have had it hammered into our heads over the years to make sure we separate the author from the work. However, if one, such as "a reader from USA" chooses not to do that, it would be wise to make sure they know something about the author they are talking about first. That said, I loved Unless. It is a simple, pared-down, quiet book. It's quite lovely. I feel lucky to have read it. Carol Shields gave me a small gift by putting that book out into the world, where I one day read it. And I am grateful to her for it.
Rating: 
Summary: Who Are These People?
Review: I don't mind the loose plot -- I'm a big fan of internal stream of consciousness, books where nothing happens for quite a while, a la Margaret Drabble, Eudora Welty. But there are serious credibility issues here. This woman is just a few years older than me -- about to turn 44 -- and for a woman who thinks so deeply about so many things, she seems to have missed the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s altogether. Carol Sheilds is a woman in her seventies, but apparently thinks she's not allowed to write about the experience of the elderly, which I would have enjoyed much more, as I'm sure she would have done it with great insight. But here is the heroine, Reta, smack in the middle of the generation of women who put off having children till it was almost too late (think of all the ripe-for-fiction accompanying anxieties that go with that), who seems to have started her family, like proper wives of the 1940s and 1950s, by her mid-twenties, no explanation offered. She therefore misses the essential experience of my post-hippie generation -- the promiscuity, experienced or merely observed, the committment-phobia of women who grew up sexually free, their eventual ups and downs in marriage, their disillusionment with real, full-time paying work (as opposed to at-my-leisure, academic writing, as here) and the inevitable toll it all takes on marriage, itself an amorphous institution. She has that old fictional stand-by, the nice husband who never resents her self-indulgent work and never loses his temper, who never has a mid-life crisis of his own. Does Carol Sheilds know any women who are married to doctors? They tend to be very difficult, arrogant men, who rarely stick with their first wife. Another chance for real life conflict missed. Also -- feminism? Don't most husbands of my generation demand that their wives earn a good living? The protagonist Reta seems to have done exactly as she liked, professionally, piggy-backing on her husband's income, without a single stint as a waitress or secretary, like most struggling writers. The very lack of financial and marital stress posits this book far out in the reaches of la-la land. At one point, the writer-protagonist says "I believe passionately that my characters work" -- but clearly both the real author and the created one know little of actual, rent-paying work themselves. The novelist heroine creates a character that's a saxophonist,and ruminates on the imagined characteristics of a player of this instrument versus another. No concept whatever of the real struggle classical musicians have actually making a living at their art. They are usually so busy, juggling teaching jobs, appearances and marketing -- they are the furthest thing from a garret artist imaginable. They are never whimsical, as the idle housewife-novelist imagines them. Likewise, this academic creates a magazine journalist with her own philosophical/literary interests -- when anyone who has worked in the glossy magazine world knows a person like this wouldn't last a day. The inability to imagine a realistic picture of work life is a continual problem of the paid-in-full housewife novelist, and Sheilds is by no means alone in her complete ignorance of the working world. I'm afraid this basic getting the facts of my generation wrong stops me from considering this a real novel, and I am shocked that no literary critics called the author on these very glaring faults. That said, I very much enjoyed the philosophical ramblings.
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