THE OTTAWA REVIEW OF BOOKS

Welcome to the June issue of the Ottawa Review of Books. We hope you enjoy our insights into recent works of prose fiction and poetry by South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo and Canadian writers Sarah Louise Butler, Marc di Saverio and Barbara Fradkin. The Covid-19 crisis i...

Reviewed by Timothy Niedermann

A novel with footnotes? Yes, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has footnotes. And the writing has a dry, workmanlike tone, very little dialogue, and not much in the way of the sort of plot and character development one would expect in a work of ficti...

Reviewed by J.R. McConvey

As much as real life shapes the novels we read, so can reality act as a prism for books. When I began The Wild Heavens, the debut novel from Nelson, B.C. writer Sarah Louise Butler, the coronavirus pandemic was still a dark shadow on the horizo...

Reviewed by Margo LaPierre

At times epistolary, innovative, and novelistic, Marc di Saverio’s Crito di Volta is the fictional story in verse of a young man released from a psychiatric institute after a decade within those walls. The sonic velocity and passion of Volta’s...

Reviewed by Jim Napier

Ottawa novelist Barbara Fradkin is an established presence in Canadian crime fiction. With three series comprising nearly twenty books penned over the past two decades, she had positioned herself as one of the leading crime writers in Canada today...

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...