The Wolsenburg Clock by Jay Ruzesky Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $18.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-62-1 BC poet-turned-novelist Jay Ruzesky’s The Wolsenburg Clock is an admirable book, and I recommend you take time to read it. It’s often riotous. It’s impeccably researched. And its passionate characters offer minute-by-minute fun. Best of all, it made me recall the singular experience of being swept up in a good, old-fashioned fable. Yes, the years wound back as I read this book, and I felt a child’s delight again. The story unspools at a civilized pace, in a way reminiscent of novels of an earlier era. This is most fitting, as the novel traces the conception, building, and rebuilding of an astronomical clock through the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern periods of history, and it delivers us into the hearts and minds of the brilliant engineers who understood and added to the clock’s magic. Think carved stone; copper; dials; statues; a model of the universe; crowing cocks; blossoming flowers; and automatons so realistic and advanced, they play musical instruments, walk tightropes, and “juggle whining kittens.” In the prologue we meet an academic on sabbatical in the small Austrian city of Wolsenburg. The…