Chuckreads

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

So, so story delivered with some but not enough style 5/10

From the jacket

"From her calamitous birth in Manitoba in 1905 to her journey with her father to Indiana, throughout her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Stone Goodwill has struggled to umderstand her place in her own life. Now 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 misconnections she discovers in between. With Irony and humor, Carol Shields weaves together the poignant story of this twentieth-century pilgrim in search of herself, and in doing so she creates a story that is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era."

I didn't find this book to be all that good. I thought it was a boring, depressing story with bland characters. While it did have some beautiful phrases and would be highly quotable they were not enough to save me from the ho-hum feeling the book gave me. The cover lead me to believe that Daisy tells her story but I didn't feel that I was getting much from her.

2 Comments:

Blogger jane said...

i felt the same. i read it awhile ago and it left no impression. carol shields is a revered writer in canada and i was left thinking why. until i read unless. this was an amazing book. and larry's party was enjoyable.

November 19, 2006  
Blogger chuck said...

I have Larry's Party here and plan on reading it too, I always try to give an author I've heard good things about a second try :)

November 19, 2006  

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