SOURCE: Rodd, Candice. “Middle-Class Marital.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5085 (15 September 2000): 24.

In the following review, Rodd asserts that A Celibate Season makes pleasurable use of the co-written epistolary form, but judges the story as complacent and lacking the depth of Shields's previous novels.

This good-natured book [A Celibate Season], written in the early 1980s but only now available in Britain, is a curiosity on several counts. It is an epistolary novel of the old-fashioned kind that relies on stamps and postal delays rather than the quick-fire benefits of e-mail; it is a co-production by two little-known writers, one of whom has since built an international reputation; and its theme of role reversal in marriage shows how quickly social norms can shift; what writer today would take for granted the reader's sympathy for a cash-strapped house-husband whose only recourse, when faced with a grimy kitchen floor, is to advertise for...