A beautifully written book about a mother, Reta, struggling to cope with her eldest daughter’s decision to make herself homeless, choosing to live on the street and beg for money for charity. We follow Reta’s unravelling emotions through the relationships with the rest of her family and also through the new novel she is writing. This is not all doom and gloom, there are some laugh out loud moments but it is also a look at women and how they fit in to society today. Some interesting topics of discussion in this book so tell your book club to get reading.
Unless youre lucky, unless youre healthy, fertile, unless youre loved and fed, unless youre offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.GOODNESS. With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Retas wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Retas voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour.Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shieldss fiction.
