SOURCE: "Redeemed by an Act of Imagination," in Manchester Guardian Weekly, October 3, 1993, p. 28.

[In the following review, Messud remarks favorably on The Stone Diaries.]

"Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smooth, functioning predictability and the need for disruption." Thus comments the narrator of The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields's latest accomplished and moving offering. Such ebb and flow, the relentless abruptness of change—it is the rhythm of life itself that Shields is addressing, its variety, the ordinariness of its idiosyncracies and the reassuring way it can accommodate astonishing, divergent paths.

To address these large paradoxes, Shields has chosen to follow the life of a Canadian woman named Daisy Goodwill, born in rural Manitoba at the start of the century to a mother who dies in childbirth and a bewildered father who cannot...