Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy, among them, her three almost grown daughters, her twenty-six year relationship with their father, her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman, and the modest success she has had with her own novel. Then one ...
Carol Shields, novelist, poet, short story writer, lecturer, playwright, teacher and winner of numerous prestigious literary awards died in 2003 at the age of sixty-eight. Though born in Illinois she married a Canadian, became a citizen and went on to become an icon of Canadian literature. Start...
I read this book as part of the Dead Writers Society's Genre Fiction Challenge for June 2016 and the Literary Birthday Challenge for 2016. At this point I am wishing I chose the other book for the genre challenge. I don't know what to say here besides this entire book read as someone who seemed to t...
Pretty much the first thing that will strike any attentive reader about this novel is that the author is doing something odd with the narrative voice. It seems to be Daisy Goodwill Flett narrating her life, but then again how could it be, since she is narrating things she could not have known? And t...
Reta Winters seems to have it all, a successful career as an author, a comfortable home, a loving relationship with her husband/not-husband and three daughters, and good friendship. However, when her oldest daughter, Norah, drops out of college and is found panhandling on a Toronto street corner wea...
I was drawn to Carol Shields' Jane Austin, A Life because I admire Shields' work as a novelist and because I am in the clutches of a severe attack of Austenitis. It hits me annually, sometimes accompanied by a far less pleasurable bout of gout. Thankfully the gout went away, but the Austen fever lin...
This is not my first Carol Shields’ book, so I had expectations when I read it. I expected vivid descriptions, sharp, ironic dialogue, and a plot that moves along gently in the background. I expected to experience ordinary life through the eyes of a keen observer, and see it elevated to a thing of b...
This book grew on me--at first appearing distant in how it treated its subject, Daisy Goodwill Flett, but ultimately moving and singular. The chapters in the table of contents tip you off you'll be reading about a life entire: Birth - 1905; Childhood - 1916; Marriage - 1927; Love - 1937; Motherhood ...
I am so sorry that the world lost Carol Shields. What an amazing writer. I will, one day, write a review of this book but every time I begin I give up because I cannot capture it correctly. Odd, because it is one of my favorite books.
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