Baskadia

Reta Winters, a writer, has three delightful daughters, a faithful husband who is a family doctor, and a seven-year-old golden retriever named Pet. They live in a small town in Ontario in a 100-year-old farmhouse with an apple orchard, raspberry patch, and separate rooms for each of the three girls. Theirs is an affluent, unremarkable, middle class life, until the oldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Norah, goes missing and is found, uncommunicative, panhandling on a street corner in Toronto with a sign that reads "goodness." Norah has abruptly and inexplicably withdrawn from the world refusing to talk to her parents, sisters or boyfriend.

Written in the first person narrative, Reta escorts the reader through a mother's daily routines under the dark cloud of a disconnected daughter. Each of her women friends and acquaintances express support and their unique insight for hopeful resolution. There is little Reta can do though. Once a week she drives to Toronto with food and clothes for a daughter that refuses to acknowledge her presence, so Reta spies on her from nearby stores. At home, she carefully sweeps the cellar stairs, as if getting the dirt out of the corners will somehow enlighten the shadow that has befallen her offspring. The timeless anguish of motherhood is palpable.

Shortly before Norah disappears, she laments to her mother over the immensity of the world, about her struggle to get past the little things. She says "I'm trying to find where I fit in."

Given Reta's feminist perception of the world, she believes that her daughter's malignancy is founded in the exclusion and powerlessness of women, that despite "having come so far," they've been snookered into the side pocket. Through Reta and her mentor Danielle Westerman, an aged literary feminist, Shield splatters her story with the female grievance, about the male power play and the non-recognition of women etc. It's not a hard sell though. Reta drafts letters criticizing male writers for excluding females from their lists of achievers, yet she never mails them. And in her ending, Shield wags her finger at the shrillness of Reta's complaint.

If you are a reader accustomed to being hooked in the first paragraph and reeled in by the end of chapter one, a reader who believes that a novel is first and foremost story and that style is irrelevant, you might be disappointed with Unless. Only Shield's strong prose and your faith that she'll get to some point will carry you to chapter two. This novel was not written to entertain. Indeed, Danielle Westerman chides Reta "for the unworthiness of novel writing." Reta is inclined to agree: "...what really is the point of novel writing when the unjust world howls and writhes...UNLESS they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they're just so much narrative crumble" (emphasis is mine).

Unless is not narrative crumble. It is the last word of an accomplished author with five children and terminal cancer. Unless did more than take me inside the mind of a mother in grief. It made me wonder whether we are so trapped by our history that, in the end, we are uncertain who we are and what we have done.

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