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The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio) | 
 enlarge | Author: Carol Shields
Creator: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $6.75
You Save: $9.25 (58%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  170 reviews
Sales Rank: 41113
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0143105507
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780143105503
ASIN: 0143105507
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.
Product Description
In celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Carol Shieldss Pulitzer Prizewinning novel is now available in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
ONE OF THE MOST successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisys vividly described inner lifefrom her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 165 more reviews...
 Almost didn't finish it August 26, 2008
Admittedly, my interest ebbed and waned throughout this read. Just as I thought I "got" what the author intended, a new narrator would intervene and I'd be forced to revaluate the story. This, ironically, was the tension that kept me reading when I felt either lost or frustrated. I was determined to understand what Shield's was saying.
Unlike many other reviewers here, the final two chapters were where I experienced my eureka (intended or otherwise by the author); where I found the story absolutely profound. Close to her death, Daisy finally considers the iconic female role-model she appears to be to others (that of wife-mother-God-fearing-martyr), the role that society has always rewarded her for---rewards that have come in words of praise----however condescending, and with financial comforts. But what was the cost? Threatened, now, with death, those rewards seem empty, unfulfilling, unmerited, and sometimes commically inane.
On her death bed, she's self-aware enough to question her possible cowardice in accepting this role, this willingness of hers to let social mores and the vagaries of life sweep her along----self aware enough to indulge the few profound moments she's experienced, yet she still tempers her joy with habitual apology for putting her own needs first. This inner conflict between the woman everyone thinks she is and approves of, and the half-formed free spirit who struggles for a voice which would more aptly describe her (regardless of the age of her body), makes this novel Prize worthy.
So yes, I FINALLY get why this is a breakthough feminist portrait. Shield's seems to be saying that women of Daisy's generation weren't OBLIVIOUS to their gilded cage at all, they were absolutely able to recognize both the benefits of the cage and its confines. They felt some pride in living up to the expectations of society, despite it's cheap rewards, even while they were capable of stepping outside of themselves and dreaming of greater things.
The icing on the cake? Shield's structure. She allows various narrative voices to intervene to explain Daisy, to judge her, to praise her, to often jovially condescend to her shortcomings. Looking back, The Stone Diaries begins as a classic story of the heroine---born under exceptional circumstances (the author's promise of an exceptional life to come), but Shield's then breaks the rules and narrates a very unremarkable, unfulfilled, typical perhaps of its day, frustrated life.
I am so glad I hunkered down and finished what I thought would turn out to be a real dissapointment.
 Both wonderful and boring at the same time June 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I finished the book, even though the story line was, at best, boring. There was nothing to grab your attention, no good beginning, climax, ending. However, this author has a way with words that kept me reading...it wasn't the story that kept my interest, it was her words. I loved the way she is able to put words together...poignant, tender, illuminating. Words are such amazing things, and she does an absolutely incredible job with putting words together.
A multigenerational family saga of daily life April 22, 2008
This highly praised Pulitzer Prize winning novel centers focuses on the daily life of an as-it- were ordinary woman. But the extraordinary is present in her life from the very moment of her birth in which her mother died. The story is a multi- generational one and focuses on the inner feelings of the characters especially the women. There is a dramatic difference between the male characters and the female characters in regard to their intimate lives. But there is sympathetic relation to both male and female characters.
The book has been praised for its sharp and insightful language.
While sensing these positive qualities I felt a certain absence of 'lift' of a kind of intense joy in reading that I have when involved in books I feel to be of the most inspirational kind.
Good, but not great.
 FANTASTIC!!!!! April 1, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Please read this book. Every minute you spend reading this book will open your mind and heart into a real family, with and without warts. This book is simply perfect.
 I'm not sure what to think...or what I'm SUPPOSED to think... September 26, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
The first thing that came to my mind upon finishing this novel was, "THIS won a Pulitzer?"
I will be kind and say that when I started the book, I was actually interested--for about the first third of it--although I wondered how it was supposed to be a book about Daisy Stone Goodwill when it hardly said anything about HER. But then it started delving into her life, and that's when it began to get boring! Daisy did absolutely NOTHING interesting. About the most interesting thing that happened to her was her first husband dying. If she had actually had a great love with her second husband, as I expected by the chapter entitled "Love", there might have been some redeeming qualities, but that was not the case.
I was left itching to know more about other characters, Magnus Flett, "Fraidy" Hoyt, and Maria (Cuyler Goodwill's second wife) in particular, but the only thing that caught my eye about Daisy was her dying thoughts about her life, or lack of it. Then came the chapter entitled "Death", which was a hodge-podge of senseless blather, and at that point I realized that nothing would make this a GOOD book, but at least I could claim that I finished it.
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