SOURCE: "Impressions," in Canadian Literature, No. 130, Autumn, 1991, pp. 149-50.

In the following review of The Orange Fish, Spettigue compares Shields' writing with the work of Alice Munro.

Twelve stories in the post-post fashion. They begin casually, they wander about, sometimes they have little story line, perhaps no closure. They have theme, though; they have, usually, a consistent point of view. Carol Shields is a critic, is a novelist, is an excellent writer of short stories; she knows how these things work. She must remind her readers of Alice Munro.

Not that you would confuse Shields and Munro, though the worlds they draw many of their subjects from are often the same: the professional maze, with its own rules for survival; the domestic scene, banal but viewed in an odd light; the perpetual, depressing puzzle of the generations—"Family Secrets" is a title for either author. But though they...