This is a beautifully written story of a woman's life. I was more caught up in the frustrations and limitations of Daisy's life, and critical of her. Having just re-read it, I think I have a better understanding the point of the novel, and I'm in a place that it is beautiful.

The review from the publisher captures better than I can why I found this book so compelling reading it twice, almost twenty years between the readings:

"This is the problem that Carol Shields addresses in The Stone Diaries: how do small lives, the kind most women were once assumed to lead, assume significance and coherence? How closely do our versions of those lives correspond to objective facts? Can facts be said to exist at all in the context of something as changeable and arbitrary as a life? To what extent do "our" stories really belong to us, considering the tendency that other people—parents, spouses, children—have to intrude in them, interpret them, claim them?" (From the Penguin website for The Stone Diaries)