Shields's creation of a fictional (auto-)biography--including an epigraph comprised of a published poem by the protagonist's granddaughter, a family tree, and photographs of the main characters--moves readably between first and third person narrations, internal and external focalisations, and an unobtrusive, then intrusive implied author. It strikes directly at the relationships among fictional and nonfictional narratives, literature, biography and autobiography, blurring multiple boundaries. This fictitious nonfiction emphasizes the constructedness of all narrations, oral or written, whether they are stories we tell ourselves about our life, others tell about us, we tell about others, or ones we believe are not "made up".

Beautifully composed around two central metaphors of flower and stone, the novel also highlights the intricate relationships among self and other, self and Other, and self as other. In so doing it explores with wit and insight individual and collective histories of life in twentieth century United States and Canada. Even as it advocates living life as a narrative creation, it demonstrates the leitmotifs of lives lived and told, the intergenerational resonances, the extended metaphors of our narrations--the extraordinary ordinariness of a descendant of stone masons, botanists and gardeners becoming "an award-winning paleobotanist."