SOURCE: "Smaller than Life," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. XIII, No. 7, April, 1996, pp. 17-18.

In the following review of Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden, Lipton compares the protagonists from each novel.

Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden, Carol Shields' earliest published novels, unfold in Canadian suburbs and cars; they portray the lives of decent people who slowly pull meaning, sometimes wisdom, out of mundane pain and familiar satisfactions. Indeed, the books are like laboratories where Shields peruses the commonplace and discovers her metier. There is nothing in them that is larger than life. There is something, however, that makes Small Ceremonies and The Box Garden remarkable, particularly for women readers: the protagonist of each book is a woman who writes.

Small Ceremonies was published in Canada in 1976, The Box Garden in 1977. I suspect they were originally intended as one book which didn't coalesce and so was...