3 1/2. I love her writing and I love many of the themes of this book. I didn’t love the direction it took toward the end, it was kind of like, “oh look how hard it is for suburban white girls to witness the pain of marginalized people,” but I guess it’s a “write what you know” type of thing.

This felt quite a bit like an update of Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own, moved to the year 2000 and set near Toronto, and the writing style is smooth and gentle, but often you wind up thinking: "...Is that it?"

And the ending is far too neat, too abrupt, and too crowd-pleasing.

Picked this one up in the free books mayhem when Babbitt's closed. I don't remember anything about it otherwise.

A brilliant book. It quietly, but persistently, pushes forward to assert the place of herself, her daughters, while exploring feminism and the concept of 'goodness.'

I sat there nodding, 'I know what she speaks.' The laments, the frustrations of so many, put together without dramatics. I saw a bit of every woman in my writer's group - wise beings at an age where society likes to shelve, overlook.

I wished to crawl into the pages and chat with women there, pick their brains, share a cup of coffee.

I am so glad I decided to spend more money and buy the solid book, not kindle. To be able to leaf through the pages and read again and again.

Yes, I adored this book.

Sublime. I found myself savoring sentences, words, ideas.

I'm not sure why I continue to start Carol Shields books. I've liked exactly one of her books and given up on several. I guess the stories sound good but turn out not to be. The one book I did read (Larry's Party) was actually an audio book so I guess I haven't really "read" one of her books.

This was the last novel Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields wrote shortly before she died. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is considered semi-autobiographical. It's written in the first person voice of its protagonist, Rena Winters, a forty-four year old woman, wife, mother of three daughters, one of whom has inexplicably dropped out of society and spends her days sitting in the street outside a railway station, displaying a hand-written sign saying "Goodness". The reason for this only becomes apparent at the end of the novel. It's a remarkable book, a quiet meandering record of the protagonist's inner struggles with parenthood, writing, marriage and what it means to be a woman in a society where women continue to retreat to the domestic sphere as a kind of refuge and a way of proving their “goodness”.

A touching portrait of a family living under a cloud of sadness. Reta had a satisfying middle class life, with 3 well behaved daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying career as a translator and author. Then life crumbled when the oldest daughter, Norah, checked out of conventional life to sit at the street corner. Suddenly, her life changed completely emotionally, yet stayed very similar practically. Different characters adopted different ways to continue normally while making sense of Norah's situation. The father switched "hoby" and researched mental illness, the sisters appeared to just continued as normal teenagers, but went every Saturday to sit with their sister on the street corner, the grandmother stopped talking, friends offered various advices and suggestions to comfort. Reta escaped through her novel writing, but also tried to explain Norah's action as a reaction to the chauvinistic power struction of the world. I found some very keen and insightful description of living through sadness and grief. In the end, the story ties up neatly and hopefully, perhaps too neatly. But as Reta observed in her novel writing process, "tidy conclusions are a convention" but "it doesn't mean that all will be well for ever and ever, amen; it means that for five minutes a balance has been achieved at the margin of the novel's thin textual plane"

I have been told for years that this book is amazing and beautiful and I finally got to it and--yes, yes, it is. I loved the circuitous route through the heartache at the centre, and complicated multiple strands of feminism and art and bourgeois complacency. It reminded me a LOT of Mrs. Dalloway. The ending is a abrupt and unlikely and too happy--very much as if the author had gotten tired of writing the book--but the rest is so very lovely and poignant and thoughtful.