Club Protocol Release: Unless KINDLE MOBI by Carol Shields H.A.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Canadian novelist Carol Shield's last novel, Unless (2002) is perhaps Shield's best ever, insightful but never pedantically so. Shield's manages to write in a way that is as naturally paced as breathing itself, yet with images so apt they pounce off the page. Within "Unless" is a woman who lives a life of quiet routine and domesticity, and yet it is a fractured life, a crack that threatens to open into a yawning fault line. The protagonist, Reta Winters, tells us in the first sentence that ''It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now.'' Her daughter, Norah, has abandoned her family, but provides no explanation for why she sits on a street corner begging, with a sign that says "goodness". Despite her characters' wounds Shield keeps the tone throughout measured and calm, so that we understand that the fissures that seep throughout and behind the foundational home of our selves and lives, are as rent with wonder as with pain. Shield lets us into world that is, yes, full of regret, remorse, and agony, but one which is also overlaid with a light and exquisite irony. Lives may crack asunder, but as with all of life's twisted plots and tales and journeys, they also provide us with those moments in which intelligent, thoughtful wit and sensitive comedy can console us. (H.A.)

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