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Carol Shields Message Board 12/17/2008 10:28:48 AM
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Shields has written!

Author Shields's Book Reviews

Happenstance
This book has the unusual format of containing two books in one: from front to back reads "The Wife's story" and from back to front "The Husband's story." The latter was written first, but the two are written such that either can be read first. The wife, Brenda Bowman, is a housewife who has recently gained commercial success and cultural renown as a quiltmaker. As the novel opens, she is leaving her Chicago home to attend a quiltmaker's conference ...
Larry's Party
"Larry's Party" , a 1997 novel by Carol Shields, is a humorous treatment of an ordinary young man who reaches the height of his powers in his mid forties after two marriages and a loving relationship. Set in two cities, Winnigeg and Chicago, the book is concerned mainly about how Larry, brought up by a working-class couple who emigrated from England, found fulfillment in creating mazes. First fascinated by the labryinth he visited in Hampton Court on his...
Small Ceremonies
This is the story of a year in the life of one woman, Judith Gill. She is an expert at analyzing the relationships between people because of her profession as a biographer, and through this particular year she struggles to understand the changing relationships with those in her family. Her children are growing up in a new era with desires she doesn't understand, her husband is often distant and not as contemplative as is she, and she spends a tremendous ...
The Box Garden
Charleen is thirty-something and newly divorced, left to support herself and her son on her meager income as a researcher and writer for a journal. She contemplates her life through smart and funny anecdotes about her past and her failed dreams of being a poet while she rediscovers joys in life through her friends and a new love interest. Just when she finds herself happy with her life changes, her father has a massive heart attack, her mother remarries,...

Shields booklist

The Stone Diaries
Daisy Goodwill Flett has neared the end of her life, and, facing her impending death, reflects upon the entirety of her life spanning the 20th century. She is introspective and retrospective. She tells stories of being a daughter, being a wife, being a mother. More than being about particular events in one woman's life, this book is about memory, life, and morality....
Unless
"Unless" is the story of a successful novelist who is caught up by the dropout of her 20-year-old daughter from society. Her firstborn now sits on a street corner in Toronto, bearing a sign "Goodness",and begs for a living. Shields prefaces each chapter with one-word headings: "So," "As", "Not Yet" and "Unless". Shields tries to bring together her family once again: her character, Reta Winters, is a novelist trying to write her third light fiction in ...