Mary Swann appeared to the world to be a simple woman, a farm wife who cooked and cleaned and performed the usual housewifely tasks. But she is murdered, and her poems (which she had privately hoarded and kept secret) are discovered. However, as her poetry begins to attract attention from scholars and the press, her notebook, her first drafts of her work, even snapshots of her strangely vanish. Shields' "Stone Diaries" was a best seller; this book deserves to be more widely read.

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I didn't understand this book, you could say I just didn't "get" it. I was expecting it to be about Mary Swann who was a poet and murdered but instead it gave a lot of insight into other key characters that liked her poetry and were trying to solve her murder? I think that's what the point was? The characters were very interesting and well formed and a lot of small details were given about their lives individually.

I have read another book by Carol Shields "Small Ceremonies" which I completely enjoyed and really got into the plot on that one.

This one, I didn't like.

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The subtitle is 'A Literary Mystery' but unfortunately the culprit is easily guessable fairly early in the book. The author seems to be sneering at all of her characters throughout. The fifth and final section is presented, for some reason, as a screenplay, with large chunks of stage direction that could easily have been given as straight narration, thus making the book shorter, for which I would have been very grateful.

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