From Publishers Weekly
Love at first sight becomes new, as Shields delights the reader with her carefully polished prose. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Fay McLeod and Tom Avery are likable souls: kind to their parents, close to friends and co-workers, dedicated to their professions (she's a folklorist, he's a radio talk show host). But thus far both have been unlucky in love. Fay has never married; Tom has married and divorced rather too often. Participating on the periphery of lives of married friends has begun to pall. They finally meet, and it is a coup de foudre for both, but Fay is leaving that night for a month of mermaid research in Europe. Even when she returns, their affair is jeopardized by upheavals in others' lives. Can a woman of letters find happiness with a spokesman for the commonplace? Stay tuned! This is a most satisfying book, with dimensions of character, details of plot, and insights into contemporary life that sustain reader interest throughout. Highly recommended.-Marnie Webb, King Cty. Lib. System, SeattleCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, reads her comic romance with sympathy, humor and a storyteller's expertise. Her soft, un-actorly voice lends intimacy and authenticity to her delightful style. At times, fatigue brings out barely discernible mouth noises, though her energy and concentration never flag. Unfortunately, her glassy "s's" will affect some listeners like fingernails on slate; this is a fault the producers should have solved with a simple gizmo aptly called a "de-esser." As is the case with many Penguin audiobooks, we occasionally hear edits while, unlike many Penguins, there is little ambient noise. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Canadian Shields (The Orange Soul, Swann, etc.) is mostly a miniaturist, but in this clever, erudite novel she adapts her metaphorical bons mots to a larger landscape, wherein a lovelorn folklorist who studies mermaids and a late-night talk-show host three times divorced find each other. The two middle-aged protagonists, who live in Winnipeg, meet about midway through the story--until that point, chapters alternate between Fay (with her mermaids, her seemingly happy parents, and her 65-year-old godmother Onion) and Tom (``This business of being a guy, it never lets up''). The structure allows Shields a good deal of fun--Tom, for instance, attends a lecture on ``The Ghettoization of the Single in Contemporary Urban Society''- -but also allows her to chronicle, with the lightest of touches, the usual midlife tragedies in both lives: an acquaintance of Tom's falls down dead; Fay spends her first few chapters breaking up with a man she no longer loves before planning a research trip to Europe. When the two meet, bells ring. They both come alive to the erotic nature of the world and urban life, and Shields chronicles the initial infatuation, and the subsequent engagement, with an understated lyrical touch: ``The smell of food fattened the air.'' She is always an ironist, however, and her lovers do not find happiness so easily: ``Belief, Fay knows, is sometimes perverse.'' After she receives a bottle of urine as an engagement present (Tom has much earlier received a package of excrement) and leaves Tom to stay with her mother after her father leaves, she calls off the wedding. But all's well that ends well--in this case with marriage and happiness. Shields again displays a comic touch that is at once satirical and touching: a familiar story given an original treatment and a western Canadian setting. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
?A touching, elegantly funny, luscious piece of fiction.? ? The New York Times Book Review

?Superb.... It takes courage for a serious literary novelist to toast love with the exuberance Shields does here.? ? Boston Globe

ANNOTATION

The acclaimed author of The Orange Fish and Swann writes a delicious, sophisticated novel of modern romance about a folklorist with a penchant for the past who falls in love with a off-beat, spontaneous disc jockey, who's definitely wrapped up in the present. "A touching, elegantly funny, lucious work of fiction."--New York Times Book Review.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal