SOURCE: "A World Made of Words," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. VII, No. 3, December, 1989, p. 16.

In the following review, Fellman discusses Shields's interest in form and personality in Swann and her investigations into order and chaos in the stories in Various Miracles.

Now that the US and Canada have signed a free trade treaty, perhaps it will be possible for more than one or two Canadian women writers to slip past the US cultural border. High on my list of imports is Carol Shields, whose fifth novel, Swann, and collection of short stories, Various Miracles, have just been published in the US. Shields, who was nominated for a Governor General's Award for Swann, and is the subject of a recent special issue of the Canadian feminist literary quarterly, Room of One's Own, has enriched Canadian fiction writing and poetry, and deserves to be better known in the...