This took awhile to get through. The characters didn't grab me at first. But I am so glad I read it. Very heavy read about women and society.

I didn't get into this book early, but once I did, I loved it. I couldn't believe how the author changed the styles--having characters be the speaker, using letters--these captured me. The final chapter was so real. How did the author know so much about the things that happen as one is failing? Very moving

You just have to read this book and experience the extraordinary story telling and the characters. I was immersed in the story and read it quickly - too quickly. A well done Pulitzer winner. I'm looking forward to reading more by Carol Shields.

It was very well written. After I got through the first chapter I figured out what the book was about and couldn't put it down.

It seems strange to be discovering a Pulitzer Prizewinning writer, born five years before me, only seven years after her death. But I'm glad I did. Daisy Goodwill's birth and childhood, in a quarry-town in western Canada, are respectively singular and meager. A fatal accident on her honeymoon saves her from what promises to be a disasterous first marriage, while her second marriage is both fated and fortunate. Once comfortably lodged in the upper middle class, she has a not-too-eventful midlife, which Shields's varied sylistic approaches keep consistently interesting. Daisy's last years, however, are both typical and grim.
I can't help surmising that Daisy bears some relationship to Shields's own mother, but in any case after a rocky start she lives a life not uncommon for middle class women born at the beginning of the 20th century, when women worked only if they had to. Daisy's most fulfilling decade was when she wrote a weekly garden column for the Bloomington, Indiana newspaper under the name of "Mrs. Green Thumb." The recogniton she received for her expertise as a gardener gave her a sense of self-worth that otherwise eluded her. She was from hard-working stock, and needed meaningful work to feel fulfilled.
The author has set herself the task of showing how extraordinary an "ordinary" woman of her mother's generation could be, but she does not abandon her heroine at some suitable climax, but continues onward to old age and death, which are a distinct anti-climax, as Daisy subsides in the nursing home into memories and regrets about missed opportunities and roads not taken. One lesson I take from this ending is how much better off Shields's generation of women is in comparison to her mother's. Like Shields herself, Daisy's oldest child, Alice, is a successful academic and writer,though not necessarily any happier than her mother.
I wish I could find and include the summary of my own mother's life that I wrote at the time of her death at 101 years of age. She was born two years before Daisy, but into more fortunate circumstances as the daughter of a lawyer, and she earned a Master's degree at MIT, worked all her life as a teacher, public health official, and once again an elementary school teacher, the work she excelled at and loved the best. She married a man she considered brilliant and handsome, put him through college and graduate school, had one child (she wanted two) lived abroad several times in Europe and Mexico, was a serious amateur painter a dozen of whose canvasses are still hanging in the assisted living establishment to which she moved from her apartment at the age of ninty-three, and was still happy to be alive at 101, going for the longevity record.
She had more fulfillment in her life than Daisy Goodwill, but she had a good head-start, and was considerably more energetic and self-reliant. So much depends on the start we get in life - not only the externals of sufficient income and a solid family upbringing, but also the inner story of who loves us and who we love, and how these loves are expressed. Despite the dire circumstances into which Daisy was born, she found people to love and care for her, a husband who adored her, three healthy children, material security in her adult life, and some, if not enough, fulfilling work. She deserved a better memorial than her distracted children, preoccupied with their own troubles, were able to provide. Perhaps Shields already knew that she was fighting cancer when she wrote this bitter ending. I think Daisy - or anyone - deserves better. But that may be exactly the author's point.

This book took me a while to read as I was never really drawn in or enticed to keep reading it. Nonetheless I read on, enjoying the fine writing, and still certain that a climactic end was in store. Well it never really came, yet something more rewarding occurred that caught me by suprise. Upon finishing the book, I sat,closed my eyes, and relished in the thoughts this book provoked in me. Thoughts about life, its meaning, its purpose, how to approach it, thoughts of family, of friendships, of births and deaths, of work, of retirement, of illness, and of my own death. I was quite saddened by the book. The family and friends of Daisy knew so little about her really. She became, to them (and to me), this old lady who repeated herself, and led a self-denied life of wife and mother. How sad and I will never let that happen to me is what I thought. However, Daisy,herself, it seemed, never really thought much about what she might of missed, or what more life could have given her. She reminded me so much of my own grandmothers, who never really thought too much about what they didn't have. They didn't ponder on life's mysteries or their discontentments. They merely lived, not worrying about such trivialities, but rather took one thing at a time and took life at its face value. I believe that many younger generations today, as Daisy's family did, see this as a weakness, a meaningless life that never attained self-actualization. I'm not so sure about this. Who was really unhappier? Daisy or her children? Who seemed more content? Daisy or her ever divorcing, job-changing, scattered children? Very thought provoking. Read it and learn something about yourself,about life.

It is well written, just not much of a story. Characters not really compelling, plot not too interesting, narrative pretty slow.

With respect to the Pulitzer Prize, one cannot deny that Carol Shield's writing is elegant and highly readable. The story, however, of Daisy Goodwill was not very interesting to me. A fan of historical fiction, it had a true ring to time and place, but I wanted more.

Born under extraordinary circumstances to a woman who died in childbirth and either didn't know she was pregnant or simply kept her pregnancy a secret inside her obese body, I felt the story started out with great potential. It's just that the narrator, going in an out of first person, is all over the place with the timeline and it never picked up a sustainable pace compelling me to read on-even after 100 pages.

Highly disappointing.