The Keepin’ It Real Book Club

adverb
noun Grammar
a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word-group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc. (e.g., gently, quite, then, there).

— Oxford English Dictionary

“A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.”

— Carol Shields, Unless

When Carol Shields’ Unless was selected for this year’s Canada Reads competition, I was quite pleased. It was book I remembered liking, and its secret revelation, which makes your stomach drop as the pieces click together, stayed with me. But on re-reading it almost a decade later, with the novel’s central mystery set aside, I was able to focus on other aspects of the novel: its politics, its fragility, and especially those beautiful adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions that start each chapter.

For what a gorgeous metaphor for voicelessness, for marginalization, using these connecting words and these modifiers that have [...]