The Orange Fish

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Carol Shields is a writer endlessly surprised and moved by the ordinary,
the commonplace, the everyday. An amazing talent for conveying her
personal sense of recognition combined with wonderment informs her
stories of holiday reunions, with their failed promise and unexpected
rewards; of the coming together and later dissolution of an after-hours
recorder class; of the small, never-to-be-forgotten moments that
together are all we remember out of a lifetime; of the lithographed
Orange Fish of the title story, casting a spell that must and will be
destroyed when its magic is discovered, adopted, and adapted by the
masses. The six short pieces that make up The Orange Fish are worthy of
comparison with the author’s celebrated full-length fiction.