SOURCE: "A Tangle of Underground Streams," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 10, No. 1, Fall, 1994, pp. 32, 34.

[In the following review, McGill discusses the main themes in The Stone Diaries.]

Daisy Stone Goodwill, heroine and chronicler of Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries, never knew her mother, but this does not stop her from envisioning her mother's death on the day of her own birth. In a mesmerizing examination of the nature of fiction and autobiography, Shields puts the pen into Daisy's hand, thus posing many puzzles, some forthright, others more oblique. So caught up are we in Daisy's story that only gradually do we realize what she is doing—nothing less than creating the totality of her life, reaching far beyond what she can truly know, and taking liberties with what she does.

The Stone Diaries, nominated for the 1993 Booker Prize, begins with Daisy's birth and...