[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] A shameful admission for a female wannabe writer, perhaps, but I have to confess to being generally underwhelmed by women’s fiction on the market today. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the vast majority of contemporary works by women seem less engaging, more static and thinner than the more gutsy stuff put out by men. 

But then there’s Carol Shields. An unashamed champion of female creativity, and in none of her works more so than Unless, Shields fights the corner for women artists everywhere and comes out with the trophy raised high.  

A swirling and delicately constructed novel, Unless takes for its backbone the inexplicable decision of a woman writer’s daughter to go and live out on the streets of Orangetown, a fictional city in Canada, with nothing but a sign bearing the word ‘Goodness’. As her mother, Reta Winters, struggles to come to terms with this and tries to win her daughter back, she interrogates and unpicks the structures that surround her, coming to some alarming conclusions about women’s place in the world. The neat denouement, whilst perhaps straining credibility a tad, rounds off the book deftly, leaving the reader in no doubt as to what women writers can achieve.

[ book info ] Shields, Carol: Unless. (Book language: English) Fourth Estate, London, 2003 (2003). ISBN: 0-00-713769-9.