I really enjoyed this novel about the life of daisy goodwill, a housewife, mother, gardener, and at the end of the book, another person who has voyaged through life. Uniquely written, interesting perspectives. Recommend this one!

I thought the first 2/3rds were fine, but I really really adored the last 1/3. Shields does such a great job of taking you into the mind of an ailing person and the sensory-filled memories. Looking back, you never really hear much directly from the main character, more from surrounding characters. I also liked her inventive ways of telling stories through letters and almost an interview-esque style.

Mostly wise, although I found the initial chapter selectively, inappropriately intimate while at the same time ungenerous towards its subject. Mostly fluid, although I often saw the writer's toolkit in evidence. Its main strengths are the sustained, unapologetic focus on subjective female experience, and the clarity of the tension between (and ultimate equivalence of) the existential and the banal.

Who would tell the story of your life if not you: those you're closest to or perhaps someone you intersected with along the way? How would you be seen by the world through their eyes?

Over the span of a century, Daisy Goodwill lives a life that the reader uncovers mostly through the accounting of others. It is left to the reader to attach a value to her life and experiences in much the same way those who've told her story attempt to do.

I couldn't put this down once I started. And now it's gotten me thinking of how a person measures a "good" life or a "happy" life, and what do those labels really mean? And where is space made for love and loneliness?

Great book.

Interesting approach with each chapter more or less a decade apart as the story followed Daisy through her life. In the end, it left me a bit cold and suspect I'll need time to think on it. It wasn't that she died, but how isolated she was.

I had heard this book and author mentioned by several people, including Ann Patchett who recently included it in her "New to You" series. In addition, The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize among other awards. As I am writing this, I realize that I hadn't read the Introduction by Penelope Lively included in this 15th-Anniversary Edition. I will do so before I return the book to the library later today.

The Stone Diaries in a birth-to-death story (rare, per Ann P.) of Daisy Goodwill. It is told mostly in Daisy's voice, with much detail, though many years are summarized. The reader follows Daisy from her inauspicious birth in a stone mining village in Canada in 1905 to her death in a Florida nursing home around 90 years later. I referred often to the Family Tree included in the front of the book, and I love when an author includes that feature. Although there are many supporting, and quirky, characters, the story is Daisy's and it is told very well.

I am happy to have discovered Carol Shields and will look for her other books. (Ann P. recommended Unless.)

"She is a woman whose desires stand at the bottom of a cracked pitcher, waiting." (11)

"The religious impulse, as everyone knows - certainly I know - is hard to pin down. There are ecstatics, like my father, who become addicted to the rarefied air of spiritual communion, and then there are cooler minds who claim that religion exists in order to keep us from feeling our own absurdity." (48)

"The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women. . ." (89)

"Cuyler Goodwill is seventy years old, that talismanic age . . ." (132)

"It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on tope of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you're drowning." (190)

"Even her dreams release potent fumes of absence." (209)

". . . trying to remember a time when her body had been sealed and private." (230)

"In the pleat of consciousness that falls between sleeping and waking. . ." (230)

Subtle yet poignant about women's lives, and the legacy of life in general - taking the romance out of ageing and the general 'Hallmark moments' in life that are vaulted into things that are not necessarily quite what society holds them to be. Shield's then, as counter balance, adds beauty to many common activities that are overlooked without overly glorifying them.

This is only my second book of Shield's. I confess, I enjoyed Unless more. But I admire how Shield's adjusts her work to suite the story. She has not rehashed a work to create another. The two books are different. Yet, Shield's arguments and ideas are there, so is her style - thus the 'taste' of this author's work carries between books. Not all writers can transition yet still give their readers enough of the flavour they crave. It seems Shield's can. Which may be why she one so many awards.