Rating: 
Summary: The Ripple Effect
Review: In early July I finished Unless by Carol Shields and continue to be compelled to seek out what rises from this book. Thus the reason I even came to this web page, to see if others were affected similiarly. Unless is a book that I have thought about again and again, like the rare gift of an encounter with someone you cannot forget, a piece of art or music that moves you to a place that is different from the one your daily self occupies, a place you understand is real but special and rare. That is how this book impacted me. Besides this, I loved reading it. Really loved reading it. The pleasure in reading something so precisely put together - the language, the texture of image, place, characters and story, the paradox of the humorous and bitterness of a life, and the weaving of different planes of reality into a coherent tapestry - is something in itself to create a joyous noise about. For conisseurs of good reading, this is a piece de resistance. Aside from that, was the big reminder of what it is to be female in the world and the hugeness of that continues to ripple inside of me. The intial reverberation after finishing this story was that everything I heard, saw, read, etc. jumped out at me all through the lens of this awareness of how the world is created primarily by and for men. Its astounding how ingrained that way is and how the majority simply flow along with it. Thank goodness for those who are attempting to create a different direction in that river of life. And thank goodness for Carol Shields.
Rating: 
Summary: Writing that is beautiful, a plot that is not...
Review: Carol Shields is a wonderful wordsmith. She uses wordplay like no other author. The fact that I had to get out the dictionary a few times, shows that she has a wonderful command of the english language and sharing words with us to make us think. Unfortunately, the story left me flat. It was almost a book about "nothing". Nothing happened, except that we hear about the Reta's writing and her troubled feelings about her daughter Norah, who is living on the streets of Toronto, for no apparant drug problem, abuse problem or reason. At least there was a resolution to the plot, hence its 3 stars. As well, Shields uses language beautifully, but I need a story to keep me interested and entertained.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: Alright, I realize this review isn't going to be very helpful, but I've just finished the book and I'm speechless. The brilliance, the complexity, the profundity....the eloquence and elegance of the words....I can only sit here and stare at the achingly monochrome cover of this book and think: Wow. I have learned so much.
Rating: 
Summary: i could not like it
Review: carol shields does write beautifully and i enjoyed the passage describing the sexual relationship of the narrator and her long time husband. the only reason i gave it 2 stars is because of shields writing ability.... i guess this book made some sort of statement about women--- BUT i could not get past the fact that the minute they found out their daughter was sitting on the streets of toronto day after day with a sign around her neck that they did not go and bring her home and get her some help. get real....what kind of parents with the education they had(he being a doctor no less) would do that....i had absolutely no sympathy for these kooky, pitiful, self-absorbed people.....
Rating:
Summary: Unless: A Novel
Review: Despite its provisional title, its hesitant, breath-in-the-throat half-title, Carol Shields' Unless knows its own mind and isn't afraid to speak it. In this, her 10th novel, Shields constructs a tangle of questions. What is goodness? What is it worth? Is there a female goodness, distinct from the male desire for greatness? Shields gives us another writer-narrator to suggest answers - in her own life and in the lives of her characters. Reta Winters has lost a daughter to the streets of Toronto. Norah, 19, sits at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor and begs. She carries a hand-lettered sign: "Goodness." Winters has her own ideas about why her eldest daughter would run away from her rambling rural childhood, from her comfy philosophy-student boyfriend, from her ripening life. And readers of Shields' novels will demand some kind of explanation. After all, her characters don't just up and run away - even Magnus Flett in The Stone Diaries got found again, though it took decades and a trip across the globe to track him down. Winters copes by writing "light fiction," a clever detail that allows Shields to plot her own novel by the rules of that genre. Shields has certainly married form to content before. The labyrinthine construction of her last novel, Larry's Party, itself the life story of a maze maker, was a clever course of subtle diversions, plot points planted like box hedges to complicate a straightforward fictional biography. But the reader may start to wonder why Shields would constrain a novel of philosophy and feminist argument? To engage critics who have levelled at Shields the charges Winters and her "light fiction" face? Shields Winters gets revenge in the story: a journalist is humiliated; a presumptuous editor is brought to heel. At first glance, the novel's furnishings are classic Shields, eggshell light: Winters and her patient, painless tap-tap-tapping; the husband obligingly absent, except for long weekend walks; women friends, writers mostly, loving mostly. These are maddeningly insubtantial, as is the character of Norah, the errant daughter we never get to know. (She's one of Shields' gnomic good people, like the bookbinder neighbour in Larry's Party or Brother Adam in The Box Garden.) Shields' tone here, however, is stinging and new. There is vicious parody (poor journalist). There is willful self-delusion. There is told-you-so vindication when the complexities of Winters' first novel are finally appreciated. And, beneath the philosophies of goodness and evaluations of third-wave feminism, beneath even the "Ha!" sent to those who sneer at novels of domestic contentment, lies a deeper layer. Shields is reassessing a career. How else to take the opening lines from a writer whose fiction has insisted on an unfashionable capacity for happiness: "It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now.E Happiness is not what I thought." From the start, Shields announces a more multilayered examination of her usual concerns: happiness, yes, but comfort and fidelity, too, and the freedoms of mothers and daughters, wives and ex-wives and almost-wives. Because Shields picks her words the way I pick eggs (with firm resolve and deep caution, knowing exactly where they've been and what they're capable of), I can't shake a word association of my own. Her long, thoughtful, pang-washed sentences are "shields," armature protecting the empty heart, the icy absence, inside each of her novels. It's perhaps to do with living a life both academic and novelistic: Susan Sontag, Joan Givner, and sometimes even A.S. Byatt too often bury humanist heart in clever intellect. Small Ceremonies was about a writer stealing from a writer stealing from ... The novel was a box holding nothing, creativity discussed but not proven. In Swann, well, she's always been one for unreliable narrators (and unstable tenses), but its switches between points of view were serial abandonment. The Stone Diaries held us aloof by a curious, liturgical repetition and crumbling of facts. Though there is clearly suffering in each of the novels, I just can't come to care for such arm's-length risks. What's missing from Unless is the heart to answer questions the mind can never wholly grasp. What is goodness? Whatever the answer, surely it must be felt in the body. How can we mourn for Norah when we never even see her? Unless is most likely Shields' last novel, and so its sense of stock-taking is appropriate and understandable. Its abrupt concluding celebration, the gathering of the Winters clan, will be affirming to her many fans. But encompassing a life's work, it also encompasses an ongoing disengagement. Looked at this way, the book's there not-there title rings all too true.
Rating: 
Summary: Shields' most personal and powerful book
Review: Maybe the title of the review is a little strong since I have only read 2 of her other books. However, I liked Larry's party but it seemed distinctly light compared to Stone Diaries. Unless is another order of writing. It is certainly the most intense book I've read recently and maybe part of that is because I have heard Ms. Shields is very sick. I found the narrator very compelling in the way she told her story and the way she would "bump" into Norah's fix at odd times. Maybe the same way one "bumps" into their terminal diagnosis? I liked the way she spoke about her family and how clear her priorities were, the slights of daily life to herself as a woman. It was interesting that once Norah started staying on the corner, Reta started noticing or maybe became more sensitive to the daily slights to women permeating the culture. The impression that I got was that she thought that these had something to do with Norah's stance on the corner. When it turns out they don't, we are still left with a powerful indictment of our society, one that the mother of 3 girls can't help but feel strongly about. When women complain about this they are called shrill and sneered at.
This is more than a feminist tract, much more. The writing is beautiful and precise. I found it extremely moving.
I hope Shields is with us a lot longer.
Rating:
Summary: I must have missed something
Review: I've been a Shields fan for more than a decade (when I first read her novel Swann), so when the library where I work got an advance reader's copy of Unless I snapped it up. I just could not get into the story or the characters. I've enjoyed other novels with less-than-appealing characters (The Good House, The Corrections, Crow Lake all come to mind). Reta and her family just didn't click. I wondered if Shields rushed through this because of her illness. ...
Rating:
Summary: I tried to read it
Review: I forced myself to read 66 pages, hoping it would take a turn for the interesting. UNLESS it happens on page 67, this book is quite a disappointment. Although written beautifully, it really was quite a bore.
Rating: 
Summary: Ugh!
Review: What a disappoinment this book was! I understand that it was an out of the ordinary novel. I am an avid reader. It doesn't always bother me when there is no plot. But all of the introspective thinking on the main characters life got very boring. Extremely. I thought about not finishing it several times. However, I heard such good reviews, I wanted to finish it & since it was so short...but the ending didn't bring much reward. It did do some explaining about her family, I'd say it was about the most interesting part of the book. The rest was just jumbled thoughts. The story didn't go anywhere. I did have stone diaries on my list to read, but I don't think I can bare it, maybe it's just not my cup of tea. Be warned.
Rating:
Summary: UNLESS just might make you think. . .
Review: It's funny. I read some of the other reviews of Carol Shields' novel UNLESS and wondered what on earth they were talking about. Maybe that's another review though, and one which has no purpose in this medium. This is what I "got" from UNLESS and it just seems so different from what some of the other reviewers got. Women are still treated as inferiors in this world and because of that Reta's oldest daughter Norah is now sitting on a Toronto street corner with a sign around her neck. Women are not recognized for their worth. This is what I hear Carol Shields telling us. Or was that Reta Winters? Whoever. I heard it and it's so true. I had lunch today with the father of a friend who twice called me, "My dear," in a tone so condescending that if he weren't my friend's father, I would have left and never had another conversation with him. Why does he talk down to me? Because he fails to value women. Why does he fail to value women? I'm not sure. Do all men think this way? Absolutely not. But the majority of society does, has, and will continue to do so. Norah's statement of goodness, the sign she wears around her neck as she sits on her corner day after day after day, is not meant to change the world but to change her feelings that the world isn't good and especially isn't good to women. There will be many detractors of this belief, but most of them will be men or people living on another planet. Perhaps I've oversimplified this but I could probably write a thesis on much of what I'm hearing and thinking because of reading this novel. This is an important book in many ways and one you need to read with your eyes and your mind wide open. I am saying all of this because Carol Shields' book made me think about this. This isn't a story without a plot as one review said. The plot is there for all of us to see if we're just willing to look.
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