Felicity Papers: Forgotten Voices of a Valley Town

Marcia Sweet, formerly head of the Douglas Library’s
Information/Reference Unit at Queen’s University, is currently an
Ottawa-based information consultant and freelance editor.

This book consists of a series of “found” letters describing the
social history of a fictional Ottawa Valley town between 1946 and 1985.

Although the story of Orville Quinn indirectly elicited from the
letters is an interesting one, the book as a whole is problematic on
several levels. Letters from 1958 contain anachronistic references to
“baby-boomers” and “battered women,” terms that didn’t enter
the popular culture until the mid-1970s. The characters all speak an
inconsistently rendered “hillbilly” dialect. The writing is for the
most part pedestrian and marred by frequent typos. The surfeit of
characters makes the book difficult to follow; an “Identifications”
section listing a partial cast of 64 people fails to sufficiently orient
the reader. Finally, the use of letters is contrived and resistant to
direct, effective storytelling.

There’s a good story here, but the structure and careless research
sabotage it.