About this title: Reta Winters is a successful novelist, Tom is a doctor, and they've been living together for over 20 years. Life has been good until Reta's daughter Norah leaves home and becomes a street person in Toronto. Carol Shields's novel--which she claims will be her last (she was suffering from terminal cancer when she wrote it)--is about not only family and its complexities, but the literary life and its intersection with what is real. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Really good condition. Clean. No markings or folds. Has small amount of wear on cover and edges. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780007154616ISBN:0007154615
Description: Very Good. Very good. Very light general wear with dogeared pages. Pages clean, tight, straight, unmarked. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 336 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
"I loved the chapter titles. OK: funny first thing to say about a book but it's true! I was reminded a bit of Atwood's style, which is also funny, as she is mentioned in this book. A bit of plot: a family is struggling to understand why their daughter basically drops out of life to sit on a Toronto street corner day in and day out. Told by the mother, in first person.
Structurally, I loved how Shields told this story. I loved how the narrator would be talking about what was happening to her in that day, and seamlessly delve into the past, and then back again to the present. (I'm exhausted right now, and am having a hard time describing this in any better way!) It's harder to do than most people would think."
"This is maybe a book that not everyone would appreciate fully. I think it speaks very much to mothers, to women over 30 or 40, maybe to writers. The main character, Reta Winters, is the mother of three teenage girls, one in college. She experiences a very sad and disturbing period of time with one of the daughters (no spoilers here!) that I think many mothers could relate to, even if, like me, they have sons rather than daughters, or even their children are not at this particular age. I found it particularly interesting to know, while reading this book, that the author had terminal breast cancer as she was writing it. Possibly much of the sadness and despair she was describing about Reta's daughter may have been very similar to what she was feeling about her own situation. Beautifully written, I found many phrases in the story that I wanted to capture and remember."
"Scanning other readers' comments on this book was interesting (perhaps more interesting to me than the book). Very few folks thought it was okay---the reader either bought into the life and voice of the principal character and loved the book, or rejected it, and didn't enjoy it.
More than anything I was bemused by this so-called literary novel. Is it considered "literary" because it discusses the process and craft of writing? That part of the novel was enjoyable to me. I liked the character's dialogue with herself on the next-steps her fictional character would take. It was also fun to share the character's slight embarassment that her well-received novel received a notable prize as an "accessible" work of fiction. That sly snobbery about books appealed to me more than the book itself did.
I am not sure why my reaction to the book was so muted but I think that Carol Shields spent far too much time discussing feminine weakness and the stifling effect of the male-dominated culture on women. I don't identify with that point of view and suspect it negated the book's value to me."
"Cast as a reflection on "goodness," I read this book, instead, as a defense of the kind of fiction about the everyday lives of everyday people (esp. women) that Shields has written about so eloquently & insightfully--and positively, hopefully! But maybe she does know that's what the book is about. As she has her narrator say in a chapter titled "Unless" in this book titled Unless (3/4 of the way through): "Novels help us turn down the volume of our own interior 'discourse,' but unless they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they're just so much narrative crumble. Unless, Unless . . . Unless you're lucky, unless you're healthy, fertile, unless you're loved and fed, unless you're clear about your sexual direction, unless you're offered what others are offered, you go down in darkness, down to despair. Unless provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough.""
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