SOURCE: "A Gathering of Seven," in The American Book Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, May-June, 1988, pp. 10, 21.

An educator and critic, Brown has served as co-editor of anthologies of Canadian literature. In the excerpt below, he reviews The Whirlpool and Storm Glass. Although faulting Urquhart's ability to effectively sustain narrative movement in her works, he extols the precision of her prose style.

Jane Urquhart, Janice Kulyk Keefer, and Paulette Jiles are three fiction writers who began as poets, and their fiction remains rooted in poetry. Although that poetic quality is part of the attractiveness of their writing, at times it is achieved at the cost of the traditional strengths of narrative. In particular, Urquhart provides a wonderful group of nearly Gothic characters in The Whirlpool, makes fascinating use of historical background (Niagara Falls at the end of the nineteenth century) there, and manages to suggest intriguing symbolic depths—but her novel...