Unless

Really well written & thought provoking.Never saw it coming which was nice for a change. You won't forget you've read it. As a mother you can totally relate to how helpless & heartbroken the main character feels.

I read the Pulitzer-winning THE STONE DIARIES years ago and MARY SWANN just last year, so UNLESS (2002) is the third Carol Shields novel I've had the pleasure of reading. It was also her last, as, sadly, she died the following year.UNLESS is an eloquent testament to the awful predicament of women as perpetual second class citizens in every culture, even in modern day Canada, where this Shields story is set. Protagonist Reta Winters, a doctor's wife and mother of three teenage girls, is a moderately successful novelist and translator whose eldest daughter, Norah, has suddenly dropped out of college and left her boyfriend, and now sits on a Toronto street corner every day with a begging bowl and a simply scrawled sign around her neck saying, GOODNESS. Reta is devastated and deeply disturbed by this and struggles to understand, even as she continues to go through the motions of everyday life, including working on her second novel, which itself takes a turn away from the light, comic romance it had been. She begins to see signs everywhere of how women's accomplishments -"... have been impeded by their generative responsibility ... Women were busy bearing children ... it comes down to biology and destiny. Women have been hampered by their biology."In trying to understand why her daughter has shut down, Reta comes to see, to believe -"... that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation ... and those like Norah ... like me, like all of us, who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing ... That's the problem."In fact, UNLESS, is every bit as powerful a statement of how women have been subjugated by men as is THE HANDMAID'S TALE, by Margaret Atwood (who is even mentioned briefly). There is also a rather tongue-in-cheek nod to the importance of writing, that "writerly impulse," or -" ... a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages ... This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it. "It would be too easy to simply file this novel alongside Atwood's under feminist fiction, and it would also be a tremendous disservice to Shields. There is just so much more to consider here. UNLESS is a complex and beautifully written novel on mothers and daughters, on marriage, on writing and the creative impulse itself. I was completely caught up in the life of this woman, Reta Winters. She was that real. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

A mother's agonized attempt to help to her 19-year-old daughter Norah, a drop-out who now begs on a street corner with a sign saying "Goodness" around her neck, provides the framework for Shields's thoughtful and sensitive look at women's roles and the juggling acts they sometimes require. Reta Winters, a successful writer, believes at first that by writing a bright, perky novel about "lost children and goodness and going home," she will be "remaking the untenable world through the nib of a pen." But real life--and Shields's real novel--are, of course, much more complex than that.Despite the support of her two younger and very caring daughters, her empathetic husband, her friends, and Danielle Westerman, the French feminist whose books she has translated, Kate nevertheless discovers that trying to help a child who will not be helped is a terrible loneliness to bear: "I need to know I'm not alone in what I apprehend, this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time." Evaluating her life as a wife, writer, friend, mother, and, increasingly, feminist, Kate allows us to share her inner life, both as it is revealed in her writing and as she wrestles with Norah's "hibernation" on the street corner.Filled with dazzling images (an idea that has "popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn" ; women who have been "sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear"), this Shields novel is more meditative than many of her other novels. "I've been trying to focus my thoughts on the immensity, rather than the particular," Kate/Shields says. As she inspires the reader to share this immensity, she provides insights into the essence of who we are and who we might become. Mary Whipple

This extraordinary novel speaks to everyone. A must for anyone who loves Shields. The story, the characters, and the language shine!

Physically, the book arrived in good condition.SPOILER ALERT - The rest of this review is about the novel itself.It is overrated. It really has just one plot theme, the lead character's daughter having left a comfortable home to live as a vagrant and the mother's torment over it. The subplot of the lead character writing a novel is merely an excuse for digression, waffle, chit-chat and coverage of the literary world she lives in. Much of this is interesting, intelligent and engaging, but could be added to any other novel. There is not enough story for its 315 pages. The novel covers many aspects of being a woman, again interesting and important but misplaced. It's written in a kind of "fictional autobiography" and in a convincing way. Shields is a good writer but my guess is some of her other work may be better.

A book every writer should read, it causes us to reflect on the writing process and the questions we should be asking about life, about what is going on around us. The book may come across as tedious at the outset. The protagonist, who is a writer, leads a hum drum life, but Shields reveals several unexpected layers to the story. A couple of 'gasp-style' surprises come towards the end. As always, there is humour, showing us that our protagonist is fully aware of the banality of some aspects of her life. Especially wonderful is the characterization of her new 'book editor.' If this hasn't already been made into a movie, then it should be. An easy, warming and insightful read.

Self-referential, moi?And, as a fairly unreconstructed man, I could have done with a bit less of the musing about the powerlessness of women and wished she would get on with the story. My totally reconstructed wife felt the same.The first 3/4 of the book is worth four stars because of the mastery that she brings her chosen approach. After that it falls to pieces. She reverts, for the first time, to third person narrative to disentangle a sub-plot, and the denouement of the main plot is thoroughly contrived.

I found the book interesting in parts and liked the theme of Norah's decision on how to live her life and the effect it had on others; how it shaped her mother's writing. Intriguing to read and I needed to finish it.

This was our book club read and only one person persevered enough to finish it, and she said it wasnt worth the time. I got to 35% and gave up as nothing of interest had happened at all. Very disappointed given other reviews I read prior to embarrassingly being the one to suggest it.