E-audiobook
Unless a novel
Record details
- ISBN: 0792743806 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)
- ISBN: 9780792743804 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book)
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Physical Description:
electronic
electronic resource
remote - Publisher: [North Kingstown, R.I.] : Sound Library, 2002.
Content descriptions
| General Note: | Downloadable audio file. Title from: Title details screen. Unabridged. Duration: 7:01:00. |
| Participant or Performer Note: | Read by Joan Allen. |
| System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Media Console Requires OverDrive Media Console (file size: 100860 KB). Mode of access: World Wide Web. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Mothers and daughters -- Fiction Teenage girls -- Fiction Mentally ill -- Fiction Ontario -- Fiction |
| Genre: | DOWNLOADABLE AUDIOBOOK. Audiobooks. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 March 2002
Shields, author of the widely read, Pulitzer Prize-winning Stone Diaries (1994), is American-born but has lived in Canada since 1957, and her adopted homeland provides the setting for her latest novel. A gut-gripping story of one woman's difficult psychological journey, it becomes, in effect, a treatise on goodness and a testament to the several roles women must simultaneously shoulder. Reta Winters lives with her physician husband and three daughters in a farmhouse outside Orangetown, Ontario, an hour from Toronto. Well, all three of Reta's daughters used to live there; Norah, now 19, currently spends her time in silent contemplation, holding a begging bowl on a Toronto street corner. During the course of her anguish over her daughter's renunciation of her middle-class upbringing, Reta, a writer, tries to put life back into reasonable order in the pages of her new novel. Accepting that a daughter has "gone to goodness" is, ironically, a program of pain assuagement for Reta. Her need to bring her daughter back within the family fold arises from the very wellspring of motherhood, and the reader witnesses her attempted retrieval of happiness with open-hearted understanding. Shields shares with fellow Canadian Alice Munro not only her Ontario milieu but also a gift for psychological acuity expressed in limpid, shimmering prose. ((Reviewed March 1, 2002)) Copyright 2002 Booklist Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2002 February #2
From Pulitzer-winning Shields (The Stone Diaries, 1994, etc.), a tale about existential disarray that's spiked with feminist outrage and leavened with womanly wit.Until her daughter Norah begins living on the streets of Toronto in the spring of 2000, Reta Winters "thought tragedy was someone not liking my book." She and physician Tom Winters have been together for 22 years (although, mildly nonconformist children of the 1970s, they never married), and Reta has a modest literary reputation as author of a comic novel, My Thyme Is Up. Shortly after Norah leaves home, Reta starts a sequel, and we find her grieving and "at the same time plotting what Alicia will say to Roman" in Thyme in Bloom. Art sustains Reta, but its self-appointed interpreters infuriate her, and she writes letters to pundits who have ignored women's contributions to culture, an omission Reta gropingly feels has something to do with her daughter's turmoil. But because she's too suspicious of generalities to trust "the self-pitying harridan who has put down such words," she never mails them. Her first-person telling of all this, often quietly heartbreaking, is just as often bitingly humorous. Much of the fun comes at the expense of Reta's bombastic New York editor, who professes to find Big Issues in what Reta sees as light fiction but who proves able, in the story's most blistering development, to see Alicia as a stepping-stone to Roman's development. Typical of Shields's unerring pacing, this nasty revelation is followed by a crisis revealing why Norah became a street person. Reta's observations are so shrewd throughout, each detail so perfectly placed, that readers may not notice that the editor is the only other truly three-dimensional character.The philosophical questions don't emerge with the same brilliance as Shields's portrait of the writer or her modest claim for the importance of a female perspective on tragedy. Still, there's enough here to maintain her claim as one of our most gifted and probing novelists. Copyright Kirkus 2002 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2002 January #1
With yet another delectable investigation into human folly, Shields helps launch a new imprint at HarperCollins. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2002 March #2
Unlike The Stone Diaries or Larry's Party, with their sweeping chronology of their characters' lives, Shields's new novel transpires over a few dark months. In elegant prose, it examines a woman's emotional journey following her eldest daughter's lapse into either asceticism or psychosis. The narrator, Reta Winters, lives with her physician husband, Tom, and three teenage daughters in a lovely suburban Toronto home. She has intelligent women friends and intellectual fulfillment translating the works of her mentor, an elderly French feminist. On the side, Reta is the author of a well-received novel of "light" fiction. However, the family's lives are radically transformed when her oldest daughter, Norah, leaves college and takes up begging on a Toronto street corner, wearing a sign saying "Goodness." Reta connects this act with women's essential powerlessness, while Tom suspects it to be post-traumatic stress. This remarkably liberal family maintains contact with Norah but doesn't intervene. Meanwhile, Reta distracts herself from her inner disquisition on loss, family, and the role of women by mentally manipulating the characters in her novel-in-progress and dealing with her fussy New York editor, who turns up just as the family crisis resolves itself. Finely detailed, thoughtful, and sometimes even humorous, this book is highly recommended for all fiction collections. Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2002 April #5
If I have any reputation at all it is for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone's amazement, a fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction,' or so it was described in Publishers Weekly. That cheeky self-description sums up the protagonist of Shields's latest, the precocious, compassionate and feisty Reta Winters, an accomplished author who suddenly finds her literary success meaningless when the oldest of her three daughters, Norah, drops out of college to live on the streets of Toronto with a placard labeled Goodness hung around her neck. Shields takes an elliptical approach to Winters's dilemma, slowly exploring the possible reasons why a bright, attractive young woman would simply give up and drop out. As Shields makes her way through Winters's literary career, her marriage and the difficulties she and her daughter face in being taken seriously as women in the modern era, she employs an ingenious conceit by tracking Winters's emotions as she tries to write a sequel to her light romantic novel while helping a fellow writer, a Holocaust survivor, work on her memoirs. As Norah's plight deepens and the nature of her decision begins to surface, the romantic novel turns dark and serious, and Winters faces a rewrite when her long-time editor dies and his pedantic successor tries to introduce a sexist plot twist. Reta Winters is a marvelously inventive character whose thought-provoking commentary on the ties between writing, love, art and family are constantly compelling in this unabashedly feminist novel. The icing on the cake is the ending, which introduces a startling but believable twist to the plight of a young woman who, in doing nothing... has claimed everything. The result is a landmark book that constitutes yet another noteworthy addition to Shields's impressive body of work. (May) FYI: As revealed in an April 14 profile in the New York Times magazine, Shields, who has terminal breast cancer, believes this will be her last novel. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
