I just reread this after many years. It’s the story of Daisy Goodwill, an ordinary Canadian woman, who moves from one extraordinary event to the next in the course of her long life.

The most dramatic chapter in her life is her birth, which happens without a word of warning to anyone. Daisy’s innocent and well-padded mother doesn’t even recognize her own pregnancy until the birth pangs begin. And so Daisy enters life without any of the usual preparations and blessings. And it seems that many of the twists and turns of her life happen this way. She does not always choose, but is chosen. Or she comes to a turning point, and finds there’s really only one way to go.

Daisy is born in 1905, so her life is also the life of the century. The chapters are arranged like the various milestones of a woman’s life – birth, childhood, marriage, motherhood, work, decline, death.

She never really goes outside the mold, never protests the fates that are arranged for her, although there’s always a part of her that wonders what these rituals are all about. The reader hears her thoughts, and so we know how much she holds back. We also hear the thoughts of her various family members, so we know how they see her – lovingly, but never wholly.

Gorgeous story, a family epic focusing on one woman, Daisy Goodwill. Flitting between Canada, the USA and a brief excursion to the Orkney Islands, this starts off with Daisy's parents' brief marriage and her birth, working all the way through to her eventual death. It's plotted and laid out like a biography, including source material such as letters, lists, notes and even a photo gallery of many of the people of appear in the stories. Although noticably there is no photo of Daisy (even the mother-in-law from hell gets her picture in!). Although she is the main feature, she is noticably absent, as though she doesn't quite matter in this story. Or the truth of her doesn't matter. Because at the end, when she dies and the children are looking through her stuff and finding out things they never knew about her, it makes you think how well do we know anyone. Or how well does anyone really know us and our lives? Added to this is the fact that Daisy, as many women, was the lynchpin in the family's lives whilst being overlooked as opinionless - she's a mother and a housewife. And she never even got to meet her own mother, who died in childbirth - such a tragedy never for them to have any connection.
Starting off in Canada, her father is a quarryman, as are many of the men in the village. She flits between stones and flowers with her men - the first eleven years growing up with the neighbour's wife and her eldest son, who is a botanist, then back to her father moving to America and a new quarry job. Then after a very short marriage, back to the neighbour's son and flowers in her life - her garden is her one personal creative output, along with a period of working as a gardening columnist in the local paper. Her great niece even becomes a paleobotanist. But her roots are in stone, even her mother's wedding ring lost in a silver box within a pyramid her father decides to build in his backyard.
I couldn't figure out if this was all completely fiction or fictionalised history of someone Shields either knew or was related to - especially given all the family photos. There's a couple of mini articles in the back of my copy which enlightened me. It's all fiction and the photos are of people, including Shields own family, but none of Daisy's family, as Daisy never existed. I am rather curious to read more of Shields writing now.

This is a beautifully written, thoughtfully constructed tale that effortlessly brings the reader through the late 1800s and into the 1970s. It's epic in terms of the time but entirely personal in terms of the characters' development. The characters are quirky and believable. I found the women interesting archetypes/stand-ins for people of their generations.



I picked up the novel because I'm determined to read more winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (The Stone Diaries won in 1995.) Now, I'm determined to read more books by Carol Shields! She wrote a biography of Jane Austen, so that's going right onto my list.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. The opening line: "My mother's name was Marcy Stone Goodwill. She was only thirty years old when she took sick, a boiling hot day, standing there in her back kitchen, making a Malvern pudding for her husband's supper"

Daisy Goodwill is a character who will remain in my memory. The story of her life, from birth on the kitchen floor in Manitoba, to her death in Florida some 90 years later. On a personal level, the story appealed to me because my mother was born a year after Daisy Goodwill - also in a British Dominion, albeit thousands of miles away and in another hemisphere - and I recall her speaking about many of the historical events experienced by Daisy Goodwill. There are parallels in their lives in the social sense too; college, children, loneliness.

Carol Shields' writing is perceptive and rhythmic. No wonder this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. As the Sunday Telegraph comments, 'the reader does participate fully and rewardingly'. Canadian authors do punch above their weight in many different genres.

Great read. The story itself is a little slow but I enjoyed the way it was written. Each section of Daisy's life was narrated by several different people in her life. The chapter of "Sorrow" was the most interesting. It was written in a series of letters that Daisy receives. The reader has to fill in the blanks about how Daisy feels and what she is going through, since Daisy rarely tells the story.

Shields is one of my favorite writers and I read this book back in 1994, I think. Hard to believe that was so long ago.

I originally read this in 2002 and remembered that I really liked it, I decided to read it again as I had come across a copy in the last year (had borrowed it the first time). While the prose is intense and complete in a way that makes a reader want to bow down to the author, the story is, as it is probably intended to be, somewhat depressing. Maybe it just wasn't what I wanted to be reading this summer. My mindset aside, this is a beautifully written and crafted read.