---
product_id: 61562761
title: "Unless"
brand: "carol shields"
price: "Rp903306"
currency: IDR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.id/products/61562761-unless
store_origin: ID
region: Indonesia
---

# Unless

**Brand:** carol shields
**Price:** Rp903306
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Unless by carol shields
- **How much does it cost?** Rp903306 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.id](https://www.desertcart.id/products/61562761-unless)

## Best For

- carol shields enthusiasts

## Why This Product

- Trusted carol shields brand quality
- Free international shipping included
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## Description

Unless

## Images

![Unless - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51m39Qoy8dL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Memorable
  

*by G***D on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 21, 2012*

Really well written & thought  provoking.Never saw it coming which was nice for a change. You won't forget you've read it. As a mother you can totally relate to how helpless & heartbroken the main character feels.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A complex and beautifully written novel.
  

*by T***T on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 31, 2019*

I read the Pulitzer-winning THE STONE DIARIES years ago and MARY SWANN just last year, so UNLESS (2002) is the third Carol Shields novel I've had the pleasure of reading. It was also her last, as, sadly, she died the following year.UNLESS is an eloquent testament to the awful predicament of women as perpetual second class citizens in every culture, even in modern day Canada, where this Shields story is set. Protagonist Reta Winters, a doctor's wife and mother of three teenage girls, is a moderately successful novelist and translator whose eldest daughter, Norah, has suddenly dropped out of college and left her boyfriend, and now sits on a Toronto street corner every day with a begging bowl and a simply scrawled sign around her neck saying, GOODNESS. Reta is devastated and deeply disturbed by this and struggles to understand, even as she continues to go through the motions of everyday life, including working on her second novel, which itself takes a turn away from the light, comic romance it had been. She begins to see signs everywhere of how women's accomplishments -"... have been impeded by their generative responsibility ... Women were busy bearing children ... it comes down to biology and destiny. Women have been hampered by their biology."In trying to understand why her daughter has shut down, Reta comes to see, to believe -"... that the world is split in two, between those who are handed power at birth, at gestation ... and those like Norah ... like me, like all of us, who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing ... That's the problem."In fact, UNLESS, is every bit as powerful a statement of how women have been subjugated by men as is THE HANDMAID'S TALE, by Margaret Atwood (who is even mentioned briefly). There is also a rather tongue-in-cheek nod to the importance of writing, that "writerly impulse," or -" ... a life spent affixing small words to large, empty pages ... This matters, the remaking of an untenable world through the nib of a pen; it matters so much I can't stop doing it. "It would be too easy to simply file this novel alongside Atwood's under feminist fiction, and it would also be a tremendous disservice to Shields. There is just so much more to consider here. UNLESS is a complex and beautifully written novel on mothers and daughters, on marriage, on writing and the creative impulse itself. I was completely caught up in the life of this woman, Reta Winters. She was that real. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    "Remaking the untenable world through the nib of a pen."
  

*by M***E on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 13, 2005*

A mother's agonized attempt to help to her 19-year-old daughter Norah, a drop-out who now begs on a street corner with a sign saying "Goodness" around her neck, provides the framework for Shields's thoughtful and sensitive look at women's roles and the juggling acts they sometimes require. Reta Winters, a successful writer, believes at first that by writing a bright, perky novel about "lost children and goodness and going home," she will be "remaking the untenable world through the nib of a pen." But real life--and Shields's real novel--are, of course, much more complex than that.Despite the support of her two younger and very caring daughters, her empathetic husband, her friends, and Danielle Westerman, the French feminist whose books she has translated, Kate nevertheless discovers that trying to help a child who will not be helped is a terrible loneliness to bear: "I need to know I'm not alone in what I apprehend, this awful incompleteness that has been alive inside me all this time." Evaluating her life as a wife, writer, friend, mother, and, increasingly, feminist, Kate allows us to share her inner life, both as it is revealed in her writing and as she wrestles with Norah's "hibernation" on the street corner.Filled with dazzling images (an idea that has "popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn" ; women who have been "sent over to the side pocket of the snooker table and made to disappear"), this Shields novel is more meditative than many of her other novels. "I've been trying to focus my thoughts on the immensity, rather than the particular," Kate/Shields says. As she inspires the reader to share this immensity, she provides insights into the essence of who we are and who we might become.  Mary Whipple

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*Product available on Desertcart Indonesia*
*Store origin: ID*
*Last updated: 2026-02-23*