It wasn't what I thought. When I read the plot summary of the book I was totally enamoured with this whole idea of a teenage girl having a mental break down and living on street corner with a sign that reads 'GOODNESS' while she begs money. I loved the idea even more because the story was so localized. I'm a Toronto girl born and bred and having part of the story set on Bathurst and Bloor was just the icing on the cake.
These are all things I thoroughly enjoyed before I even read the book. But once I actually got into the book I couldn't help but think I'd been gipped somehow. I felt the plot summary and the actual story were incongruent with one another. The story was Reta Winters', writer, translator, and mother of the said mentally unstable teenage girl, Norah, who didn't even end up being as crazy as I'd thought she'd be.
The backstory is basically what you get throughout the whole story but the juicy part, the actual reasons and actions that led up to Norah ending up on the street. It's totally believable (BTW), but that's not what turned me off. It was the whole idea of this story being Reta's when I'd been lead to believe it was Norah's. Not that I didn't enjoy it. Once I'd grown into the idea that this was about a grieving middle-aged woman who just lost her daughter to 'goodness', I started to enjoy it a lot more. It really is a good book.

Carol Shields can write! Goodness, me! This book was absolutely beautiful, while stripping away what it means to be a female writer. I can’t wait to read her other novels!

2

I loved her writing, but was slightly uncomfortable with the assumptions that Reta made about why her daughter would choose to drop out of society. Shields glossed over the seriousness of mental illness and the actual reason seemed too tidy. Plausible but unlikely. But she's an amazing writer!

Majorly disliked the main character. Had no patience for her ramblings or incredibly dull storytelling. It would have been much better as a small set of poems, rather than a novel, in my mind.