From Amazon
The Stone Diaries was a prizewinner among prizewinners for Canadian novelist Carol Shields, garnering her the Governor General's Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In this fictional autobiography of eightysomething Daisy Goodwill, Shields includes a variety of other documents and perspectives--letters that Daisy received over the years, a list of her bridal trousseau, an occasional reminiscence by a son, daughter, or family friend, an objective third-person description of a house, and a wonderful collection of photos that supposedly come from the Goodwill family--which give us the sense that this is more than just fiction. Here we have a rare glimpse into the nooks and crannies of an ordinary life as we watch Daisy cope with love, marriage, children, gardening, old age, and death. The book serves as a diary of the last century as well, ripe with details that make readers feel they're witnessing the passage of time. Shields renders with loving care, genuine affection, and acute insight the world Daisy Goodwill makes her own.
The Stone Diaries lingers in the memory, an extraordinary achievement by an extraordinary writer.
--Jeffrey Canton
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Any performer has her work cut out for her when a novel takes place in several settings with inhabitants possessing distinctive regional accents. Shield's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel takes the listener from the plains of central Canada to Bloomington, Ind., and the Orkney Islands. Botsford is an excellent performer with a smooth and easy-to-listen-to reading voice, but she doesn't have a gift for imitating linguistic variations. The women of Daisy's Bloomington circle have Southern lilts worthy of
Gone with the Wind. Readers would expect the voices of this coterie to age as Daisy does, but no accommodation is made for this possibility. Within each locale the voices are quite distinct, though the voice of Daisy, the center of the novel, stands out least of all, appropriately enough, for in this work we see her life through the eyes of others. This is an important and deft novel and it's about time that it was recorded, even in this overly abridged version. Shields's writing still makes this worth a listen.
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--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
