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Title: Unless : A Novel by Carol Shields ISBN: 0-00-715461-5 Publisher: Fourth Estate Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.52 (85 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Boring!
Comment: I am surprisd how many people gave this novel good reviews.
Somebody picked it for our book club and then no one finished it.
There certainly was no plot and where there was some expectation of understanding the family dynamics and the seriousness of a lost duaghter per se.......all the reader gets from this book is diversion.
One minute the book leads to the (lost daughter)"Norah" story and the next minute we're reading about the marital status of some librarian friends. Totally irrelevant.
I read a lot of books, some good some okay......this was so boring that I didn't even bother to finish it.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Powerful Family Drama
Comment: Carol Shields strikes a strong and powerful chord with her novel Unless. This family drama finds Reta Winters, a writer and mother of three, in despair when she finds out that her oldest daughter has dropped out of college and is sitting on a Toronto street corner with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads "Goodness."
Reta struggles to try and understand what happened to put her daughter in such a state of despair, what has caused her to just give up. She uses her writing as therapy to try and help her and her daughter work through this and to try and get her daughter back.
This is a heartfelt story about family struggles. As depressing as many parts of this story are, Shields manages to keep the reader involved. The emotions are strongly felt through Reta and her power struggle to fight for her daughter.
Unless is strongly written and intermixes some lighter, humorous parts to lighten the load of the subject at hand. This story not only shows the emotional strain on Reta as a mother but also the hardship and pain it brings to a father and siblings to see a loved one in such a mental state leaving them to feel helpless.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of Shields' best
Comment: This is a truly fabulous novel. The plot pulls you in right away and the character development is incredible. Of course, the main character's troubled college-aged daughter -- Norah -- is a puzzle, but that's deliberate. You're supposed to spend the entire novel trying to figure her out, make sense of the family dynamics, and so on. This is one of my all-time favorite Carol Shields novels, and that's really saying something.
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Title: Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides ISBN: 0312422156 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields ISBN: 014023313X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Three Junes by Julia Glass ISBN: 0385721420 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor ISBN: 014200331X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi ISBN: 081297106X Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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