This is by no means an easy read. There were a few times the book moved kind of slowly, so once I put it down I wasn't encouraged to pick it up again for a few days. However, I was never disappointed for long.

It's hard to believe this book is not non-fiction. The author is a great story-teller and even provides photographs of the people she talks about in her book, with a family tree at the beginning (which is sometimes helpful to refer to while reading).

The Stone Diaries is the story of Daisy Goodwill. Her mother dies during childbirth, so Daisy is raised by the neighbor lady and this woman's son. We read about Daisy's life from birth through death.

One of the things that I came to understand while reading this book is that we all have a story. This woman was not extraordinary. She didn't live some incredibly outlandish life deserving of a book. But through her ordinary life we learn how extraordinary she was. If that makes sense. I guess it made me realize that somewhere in my life there's a story that could be told and possibly hold an audience for 10 chapters.

After reading the book I examined my own life a little bit. It made me realize, once again, that life is short and we only have so much time to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. And what will people say about me after I'm gone? What will they say about me while I'm still here, behind my back - in front of my face - to other people - to themselves? ( )

Page 32. Mannered Room of One's Own genre.Courtship takes one page.

I was disappointed in this book. To narrow it down I think the plot was too diffuse, it roamed around too much and never really settled on anything substantial. ( )

I found The Stone Diaries to be both highly interesting and thoroughly readable. This is a biography of a fictional woman, from her moment of birth in 1905 through to her death in the 1990s. Daisy Goodwill Hoad Flett lived a seemingly simple life yet this novel captures not only her and her family but also paints a vivid picture of life in 20th century North America. The author also includes a detailed family tree and a selection of black and white photographs that brings the whole book to the edge of reality.

The book is divided into chapters, each one entitled after an event or episode of Daisy’s life, hence we have “Birth, 1905”, “Marriage, 1927”, “Motherhood, 1947”, and as her life plays out over the pages, we absorb both her story and that of her family. Included are obituaries, recipes and shopping lists all of which open her life for the reader to explore.

The Stone Diaries is an inventive and original look at a person’s life and although Daisy was always surrounded by family and friends, it is obvious that her journey, as indeed all of our journeys, is internally a solitary one. And while the author acknowledges loneliness, she also allows for grace, candour, and dignity. ( )

The Publisher Says: The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era.

A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.

My Review: Read thirty (!) years ago, still fresh in my heart if not my mind. This quote from my commonplace book sums up the appeal, and the limitations, of the work for me:

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced—and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

"Limitation" as used in reference to this book is simply recognition that it's very much a read for older folk and/or those whose lives have been marked by grief and loss on scales beyond the ordinary. Inside those limits, Daisy is a good companion and a deft storyteller with permaybehaps a bit less than universal appeal. Her acceptance of things can feel passive, as though she's willingly playing the victim in her own narrative. Ultimately, after three more decades of my own lfe have elapsed, I now see this as her strength, her water-like incompressibility, expressing itself.

A very good read indeed. Recommended most particularly to men who are married to women. ( )