SOURCE: Sterns, Kate. “How Goodness Is.” Queen's Quarterly 109, no. 2 (summer 2002): 283-89.

In the following review, Sterns asserts that a fundamental weakness of Unless is Shields's failure to adequately define or sufficiently explore her central thematic concern with the concept of goodness.

One night, in 1981, when I was an undergraduate. I sat drinking with two friends in the bar of the Plaza Hotel in Kingston: Ontario. Unlike its ritzy counterpart in New York, this Plaza was a dive offering cheap booze and a suitably crepuscular atmosphere to the rough crowd who comprised its regular clientele, and cheap thrills to students, such as myself: tourists who came to gawk and flirt with wildness.

My two friends happened to be men: that night, they were being generous and picking up the tab. It was as simple as that. Or so I thought until a crumpled dollar bill landed on the table...