"A life is full of isolated events," writes Carol Shields near the end of Unless, "but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to link them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define... words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, therefore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet." Shield's explanation for her novel's title lends meaning to this multilayered narrative in which a mother's grief over a daughter's break with the family revises her feminist outlook and pushes her craft as a writer in a new direction.

The oldest daughter of 44-year-old Reta Winters suddenly, inexplicably, drops out of college and ends up on a Toronto street corner panhandling, with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads "goodness." The quiet comforts of Reta's small-town life and the constancy of her feminist perspective sustain her hope that her daughter will snap out of this, whatever "this" is. Threaded into her family's crisis is her ongoing internal elegy on the exclusion of women from the literary canon, which she transposes to mean her daughter's exclusion from humanity. Reta wonders if her daughter has discovered, as she herself did years before, that the world is "an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors," and has chosen to pursue the one thing that doesn't require power or a voice: goodness.

In her own writing, Reta reaffirms her own sense of self, as well as her sense of humor. As her theoretical reflections on modern womanhood play counterpoint to her unwavering sense of creating a home and keeping her family together, Reta's smarts and fears form a wonderfully coherent narrative--a life worth reading about. With Unless, Shields (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries) once again asserts her place in the canon.



This is Carol Shields!

This book is going to darkpunkangel as a part of The Indecisives Book Exchange and is a small contribution to her challenge "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die".
"Unless" is number 27 on that list. I hope you'll enjoy in the book and good luck with your challenge :)

Thank you so much for the book, this will definitely help with my challenge. Look forward to reading it!

I didn't enjoy this book to much, I found this too boring.

RES for a surprise RABCK.

RELEASE NOTES:

Surprise! Hope you enjoy the book!

What a sweet surprise - a wishlist book! Thanks so much DPA - I will let you know how I like it - I've heard interesting things about this author and her work so I thought she was worth a try ... we'll see. Thanks again for thinking of me! :=D

I actually liked this book quite a lot by the time I finished it. It grew on me but took a bit of patience to get into at first. I thought that it was very deep-feeling - the kind of book that is really saying many things on different levels (I guess that's the "multilayered" part). The character of Reta was well-developed and I could see her as a real person. I liked the letters Reta wrote under assumed names but never had the courage to mail. And this was the kind of novel that made me stop and just think/reflect every so often. I was just slightly disappointed with the ending which I thought didn't give me quite enough explanation but I seem to be rarely pleased with how a story ends - to me this would be the hardest part of writing a novel. I can see why this one made the "1001 list" - thanks for sending it my way!

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

releasing at the April Meet-Up

Picked up at MidSouth BookCrossers’ Meetup at Perkins. This one looks interesting so will read and pass on. Exciting to see the bookcrossing label from zzz in Belgrade, Serbia - the closest I've been to Belgrade is Budapest!

Sending to friend who may read and will then donate to a bookstore in Bay St Louis, MS.

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