THE OTTAWA REVIEW OF BOOKS

What better time can there be to pull out a lawn chair in your garden or on your balcony and read a good book? Well, the Ottawa Review of Books has a few to propose to you for this beautiful spring reading season. On our list of reviews this month are: Carousel by Apri...

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

Le Galopant is the oldest existing wooden carousel in the world. First carved in Belgium in 1885, it was shipped to the US for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and brought to Montreal’s La Ronde amusement park in 1967. It was allowed to f...

Reviewed by Jim Napier

Halifax, 1996: After a night on the town Father Brennan Burke is sleeping off a hangover of mammoth proportions when he is awakened by Archbishop Dennis Cronin. His Grace is not best pleased: Meika Keller, a parishioner and active member of the di...

Reviewed by Jerry Levy

In the cubed-shaped Bizarro world of the chalk-faced Superman, up is down, ugly is beautiful, and it is a crime to make anything perfect; in other words, everything is the opposite from what might be expected on Earth. Seemingly, this is the world...

Reviewed by Margo LaPierre 

Allison Chisholm delights with whimsical lyric poetry in On the Count of None, slinging an oddball medley of possibilities very much set in this world, but on a decidedly tilted axis. The collection begins by setting the stage: a violin, a do...

Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw

Who is Ian Hamilton? Well, he is currently one of the most prolific writers in Canada, and BBC Culture recently listed him as one of the top ten crime/mystery/thriller writers in the last 30 years. Since starting to write in 2010 as a rehabil...

We face strange times as a deadly virus crawls through our communities, challenging the resilience of health systems and the continuity of our economies. Undoubtedly, this will inspire many books, both fact and fiction. The world is much larger though than this current...

Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw

Some novels have strong openings followed by a memorable crescendo, only to peter out in the last third of the narrative. Anita Kushwaha's Secret Lives of Mothers & Daughters does the opposite. So much so that the last 130 pages would be bril...

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

Jerry Levy’s second volume of short stories confirms his status as a challenging and engaging Canadian writer. This latest collection (like his first, Urban Legend, which appeared in 2013) focuses primarily on urban individuals, many of wh...

Reviewed by Jim Napier

In Spiked, author Randall Denley offers readers a political thriller wrapped up in a murder mystery and grounded in a convincing portrait of Ottawa’s nuanced and high-pressure political scene.

Kris Redner is a forty-year-old Crime columnist for the...