Heller
'Songs' contains passages of unaffected loveliness, in particular Shea's reflections on her working-class hometown in Central Massachusetts, a setting cozily familiar from her novels.
— Boston Globe
Booklist
Shea's journey to understanding and appreciating her overall good fortune is a self-revelation that others affected by breast cancer will value.
Publishers Weekly
Novelist and former journalist Shea (Selling the Lite of Heaven) says that while she was never much of a diarist, she found writing about her experience with radiation therapy for breast cancer therapeutic. In order to help other women "who'd been in [her] boots," the author decided to publish her account of the six and a half weeks she spent going to a "lead-lined room." Her straightforward memoir reveals exactly what her radiation treatment involved: the drive to the hospital, the overly air-conditioned waiting room, her favorite technician, the hard little dish she rested her head in when she lay down in the machine, and the music she listened to through headphones to take her away from it all. She also shares her shock and anger at being diagnosed when she was a healthy 41-year-old woman who "liked [her life] the way it was" and her unwillingness to embrace the positive attitude many people demand cancer patients adopt. Though she connects with a handful of people on her own terms, Shea emphasizes her need for solitude. One person she feels akin to is Molly Bish, a teenager from her area who disappeared around the time of Shea's diagnosis; Shea weaves news of the search for Molly into her own story because she feels she has "vanished in a way as well." Yet despite Shea's candor and often poetic writing style, her memoir lacks focus and can leave the reader feeling bogged down in minor details. As Shea slogs through treatment, readers are given yet another comprehensive description of a waiting room. Nevertheless, the book is an important addition to a small but growing number of realistic cancer memoirs. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A long, slow journey through a diagnosis of breast cancer and the ensuing radiation treatments. Novelist Shea (Around Again, 2001, etc.) tackles her own life this time, beginning with a review of her good fortune: a loving family and husband, a successful career, close friends, a sturdy community in which she grew up that is also the subject of her novels. Although she has had her share of loss and disappointment, including a best friend killed in an automobile accident and another who suffered a mastectomy, she says her prayers every night appending lists of the simple things to be grateful for, including heat on a cold night, a check in the mail, an unexpected encounter. But suddenly, she's the one woman in nine whose breast lump turns out to be cancerous. The lump is removed, followed by nine weeks of five-days-a-week radiation treatments to nail any stray cancer cells that may have escaped the lumpectomy. The story of her visits to the lead-lined room and the "guru" assigned to counsel her, of encounters with other patients, unfolds in slow-motion detail that calls to mind the ruminations of an opium user. (In fact, Shea was prescribed "the country's number one antidepressant.") She links her own ordeal to those of others, including the parents of a missing daughter and people with more advanced or less treatable cancers. What she suffers is nothing compared to what many with more advanced prognoses endure, Shea herself notes. But that doesn't keep her from clapping the Walkman earphones on and leading the reader relentlessly down lengthy corridors while ocean sounds play and she contemplates her condition. For women facing radiation therapy, this may offer a comforting template; forothers confronting more radical diagnoses and treatment, it doesn't begin to cover the territory.
