SOURCE: Cusk, Rachel. “My Heart Is Broken.” New Statesman 15, no. 704 (29 April 2002): 47-8.

In the following review, Cusk offers high praise for Unless, calling it a remarkable novel about the realities of women's marginalized place in society.

I have always taken a pleasure in Carol Shields's novels that was slightly indistinct. Perhaps it was her composure—the membrane of absolute competence around her prose that seemed also to be a form of reticence—which rendered the soul, the motivation of her writing, opaque. That isn't a criticism: reading Shields is like talking to a good friend, someone reassuring and wise who, out of modesty or sympathy, keeps her own heart a secret. Like Jane Austen, Shields is a mysterious presence in her own fictions, a sort of shaded figure, and it seems to me that, with this remarkable novel, her narrative has finally turned to that figure and unveiled...