Dressing Up for the Carnival - Hardcover

Shields, Carol Diggory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670889210 ISBN 13: 9780670889211

Publisher: The Viking Press, 2000

Synopsis

The theme of identity and guises run through this collection of twenty-two short stories

About this title

About the Author

Carol Diggory-Shields is the author of many works for children including the poetry books�Lunch Money, Almost Late to School, and�After the Bell Rings. �She currently works as a children�s librarian and previously worked with children as a recreational therapist. She lives in northern California.

Reviews

Shields, Caroline DRESSING UP FOR THE CARNIVAL ``We cannot live without our illusions,'' muses one of the characters in this exuberant collection, stating a theme that Shields turns to repeatedly in 22 precise, penetrating tales. The dazzling title story traces the play of hope and fantasy in the lives of a series of townspeople over the course of one seemingly uneventful day, their quotidian acts revealing those stubborn, regenerative ``cycles of consolation and enhancement'' with which we overcome despair. In ``The Scarf,'' a middle-aged writer, amazed by the unexpected success of her novel, comes to grips with the limitations of her talent during a lunch with an old friend. In less assured hands such epiphanies might seem unsurprising, but the prolific Shields (Larrys Party, 1997, etc.) creates characters with such believable complexities of behavior that their discoveries are fresh and convincing. In ``Dressing Down,'' a ten-year-old boy spends the summer at a nudist camp his grandfather founded, discovering there how the battle over reticence and frankness has defined his grandparents marriageand learning also that nudity tends to dissolve possibility and mystery, making people more prosaic than alluring. ``Eros'' follows the reveries of a middle-aged survivor of breast cancer as she looks back at her long, slow discovery of sex, from her first childhood suspicions of its presence in the lives of her parents to its impact on her now-dissolved marriage. Loss has taught her that, while sex provides no ultimate liberation, it plays a vital role in helping people for a moment to feel ``part of the blissful, awakened world.'' In the terse ``New Music,'' writing the biography of a minor composer transforms its author, giving her and her family a startled appreciation of imaginations power to remake life. Celebrating the importance of illusion and accident, Shieldss beautifully crafted stories capture her characters shocked discovery of the gap between imagination and realityand their ability to find happiness despite this in the opening, beckoning, sensuous world. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Along with being an important work, 'Dressing up for the Carnival' is an endlessly levitating entertainment.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Shields infuses this enigmatic and quirky collection of 22 short stories with ingenious characterizations in heartfelt tales that are mostly character sketches capturing the gestural, kinetic truths about the lives glimpsed here, with happy results. The title story begins, "All over town people are putting on their costumes" and catalogues a dozen characters finding themselves surprised by the joy they take in their accessories: two young sisters flaunt their plastic ski passes a month after their vacation; a secretary pushes a unique English pram for her boss's new baby; an old man buys daffodils for his unfriendly daughter-in-law. In a similar fly-on-the-wall style, "Dying for Love" peeks in on three women who, unlucky in love, are considering suicide, but each finds "a handrail of hope to hang onto." Unforgettable moments include the beginning of "The Harp," when the huge concert instrument falls from an overhead window and injures a passerby; the harpist then visits the victim in the hospital. "Reportage" also is memorable for an unlikely happenstance: the discovery of Roman ruins on a Manitoba farm. When tourism supplants wheat farming, it's a boon to everyone except a retired Latin teacher. Many of the stories are light and breezy but not unsatisfying, because the characters are winning even in their mostly cameo-like appearances. Already distinctive, they could evolve into such complex or intriguing Shields characters as The Stone Diaries' Daisy Stone Goodwill or Larry Weller of Larry's Party. Some tales are slighter vignettes, but all share enough whimsy, humor and wisdom to make the collection thoroughly enjoyable and, in many instances, illuminating. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Viking Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670889210
• ISBN 13: 9780670889211
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208