The Republic of Love

I wanted to crawl into this book and pull it down on top of me. It is whimisical homage to romantic love and a wonderful illumination of the underpinnings of community. It's one of those novels I read every couple of years, just for kicks.

A friend told me that this book was disappointing to her in comparison to "The Stone Diaries" - I find this hard to imagine, I loved the story, the characters, the setting, the realness and can hardly wait to read more of Shield's books. The job choices for the characters, mermaid researcher and dj, made a charming combination, not your normal 9 - 5 world!

"Sheilds instills confidence in us all that love at first sight is still a possibility. In fact, The Republic of Love forces us to ask the question, "Is there really any other kind of love?" Few authors have been able to create characters that so effortlessly experience the many facets of moden love. Allow yourself to drift back and forth inside the hearts and minds of Eve and Tom. You will not easily forget them."

In 1995 Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for THE STONE DIARIES, a masterful novel that put her name at the forefront of the literary world. Three years earlier she gave us THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE, a bewitching novel that deserves as much claim and attention as its more celebrated successor. In this novel, set in a close-knit Canadian community so small that its citizens reluctantly find themselves recycling schoolmates as lovers and ex-spouses as friends, Shields tackles an ambitious task. She takes a subject as elusive, time-honored, and--oh, let's be honest--EXHAUSTED as love and infuses it with plenty of invigorating, modern insight and a great deal of graceful wit. The novel centers around Fay, a commitment-shy folklorist specializing in mermaid studies and Tom, a late night disc jockey with no fewer than three failed marriages in his hapless past. Each struggles to achieve admission to the republic of love without relinquishing too much hard-won independence. Their small town is one where enviable and ill-fated relationships alike put themselves on involuntary display. This provides each character with a chance to scrutinize the connections that dictate the paths lives will follow as well as the opportunity to examine the tiny tugs of the human heart that disclose truths of existence. In Shields' capable hands the subject of love becomes neither one of pure romanticism nor one of unadulterated cynicism. Employing love as a central theme is something almost every writer has attempted at one time or another, often with little success. In this case, Shields ultimately and triumphantly handles it with the delicacy, tenderness, and passion of someone with the rare ability to see clearly into the core of the human heart and the even rarer ability to describe what she finds there.