In this issue:

• There is No Decent Place to Stand by Jeremiah Prenn (Fiction)

• The Book of Maggie by Stephanie Wyeld (Fiction)

• A Change in Plans by Mike Martin (Fiction)

• Louis J. Robichaud: A Man for the Moment by Donald J. Savoie (Non-Fiction)

• Renoviction and Resistance in the Capitalist City by Cole Webber and Philip Zigman (Non-Fiction)

• The Volcano’s High Held Snow Note: Poems by Tim Lilburn (Poetry)

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller

In Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation, Sheila Weller sketches out the lives and careers of three impactful female singers. The book includes historical information as well as comments from individuals who were close to the singers. In addition to depicting the career trajectories of King, Mitchell, and Simon, Weller examines their accomplishments and struggles in the context of societal and cultural changes.

When I was a teenager, a close friend got me started playing the guitar, and it was some of these singers whose tunes I first learned. Girls Like Us reveals the background behind some songs, including Simon’s “You’re So Vain”. Weller also discusses other high-profile figures like James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, and Graham Nash who were connected at different times to the profiled singers. The famous Woodstock concert is also briefly discussed.

The book is formatted in time periods, depicting the ups and downs of each singer’s life and career in turn. I admit to sometimes getting a bit lost as to who we were talking about as the narrative flipped to the next person, but was a logical way to format the book, and the small amount of disorientation wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

At one point while I was reading Girls Like Us, I found myself singing (admittedly off-key) some songs mentioned while driving the back roads of Norfolk County. The book brought back memories as well as a deeper appreciation of the artists’ works. Girls Like Us is a revealing and informative blast from the past that pays tribute to three influential women. (Lisa Timpf)

Contributor News

Seaboard Review contributor Lisa Timpf, along with fellow SF Canada members Paula Johanson and Colleen Anderson, will be co-editing an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry related to sports. With the working title Slapshots in Space and Magical Marathons, the anthology, to be published by Tyche Books, will accept submissions from July 1 to August 31 2026. For those who want to get a start on their submissions, guidelines are now available on Tyche Books’ site, https://tychebooks.com/submissions/.

Amidst the swirling and hallucinogenic first-person narratives that make up Jeremiah Prenn’s immersive novel There is No Decent Place to Stand (Galleon Books, 2026), a world of dubiously loyal friendships bound by paranoia, treachery, and fear slowly emerges. The locale is the small European nation of Bunolle, where the currency is the bolle and has the power (despite its precarious standing in the world market) to destroy lives one way or another.

At the centre of our story is British-born Zachary “Throat” Woodbine, an angst-ridden young man. His welfare is of great concern to his friends, who give their sides of the story (as they understand it) in separate chapters devoted to each of them. They are David, a transplanted American who lacks self-confidence in his abilities as a singer and guitar player; Burton, a successful construction entrepreneur until things go very bad; Paloma, a Venezuelan-born sculptress, who like her lover David, is also struggling with her career; Gelle, an elderly store owner and a kind of father-figure or mentor to the others; and Josie, who for a time had been Throat’s love interest until she left him, thus incurring the wrath of the others, becoming something of a pariah.

Bunolleis a monarchy, ruled by an elderly widowed queen. Her son, the conniving bad apple Flenard, is the rightful heir to the throne and expects to ascend upon his mother’s death. Meanwhile, he is involved in numerous shady deals to acquire property and generally lives a privileged and profligate lifestyle. Although he is legally next in line, he has some unofficial competition for the throne from his cousin Aftan, who is of the opinion that Flenard’s shady dealings pose a security threat to Bunolle, which he uses to justify his own crafty alliances. After the friends have had their say in their subsequent chapters, Flenard and Aftan get to give their sides of things, as do their underlings. Thus, we get a litany of dirty deeds (not always done that cheap) and double-crossings that pull in the aforementioned-friends in various unpleasant ways.

These first-person testaments surge back and forth in time, although if one pays attention a shambolic linearity to the narrative makes itself apparent. What seems to be clear enough is that the inciting incident was when Throat took a photograph of Flenard kissing his mistress, as a joke really, but upon viewing the developed snapshot realized that he had also captured the image of an intelligence agent who had been thought dead. Rather than having Throat punished or thrown into prison, Flenard gives the young man a job as a courier, except, as it turns out, the letters and packages he delivers have dire consequences for those who receive them. Wracked with guilt, Throat periodically disappears from and reappears back in his friends’ lives, with cryptic confessions of doing bad things connected to his job.

Prenn makes an oddly fascinating decision after putting Throat at the centre of most of these first-person narratives. Although, Throat is occasionally quoted in conversations related in these narratives, when it comes time for his own point of view in the final chapter, Prenn lays it out for us in the third person. I’ve thought it over and have concluded that I applaud this choice. By denying his protagonist access to address the reader directly and instead assigning his story to an omniscient narrator, Prenn sets up his hapless hero as being utterly caught up in escalating events and portraying him as a faceless victim wandering helplessly toward his own appointed point of no return. In this way, I’m of the opinion that Prenn displays a controlled mastery of his craft as a storyteller.

The voices of these characters find their own unique cadences, but all share a tendency toward rhythmic repetition, which convey moments of confusion, fear, anger and even humour. It’s a prominent technique that Prenn uses to great effect, such as in this unhinged moment from Burton.

‘I have a face, a face of shit. I have ape arms, hairy ape arms that fall between fat and packed. I’ve made wrong moves. I make wrong moves. I. I. You. You in the word of God, the dictum of a fate outside of your control. In this story. Throat has just left and I don’t know when he’ll be back. That’s one point. Another point is that I’ve spent all my available capital on a minigolf course whose child-size runs are surrounded by too many dinosaurs. All my available capital on a warehouse where sex crimes will undoubtedly be committed. All my available capital on the physical token, the manifestation of the word fuck, an ugly concrete bird whose foundation occupies what once was a section of a much, much unloved park, where condoms and brown-red dry stains (didn’t seem like blood but could’ve been) gave texture to an otherwise unused canvas, some nice adult weathering, even if the weather is fuck.’

Or this opening to Paloma’s chapter

‘I came across on a boat I didn’t like, very nearly the same boat that I came to Europe on, hoping to study art, which pretense embarrasses me, now. Artists despising clichés is itself a cliché, but I do despise the phrase “study art,” and “off to study art.” The phrase kneads my skin into points, points that have no connection, and now I am atomized from my anger. I felt this way upon arrival in Venezuela, atomized, and that was before the anger. Things were strange. I was lost. This was home but it had changed. And I was to learn of something which my family had kept from me.’

One of my favourite examples of a wry exchange is this nifty bit of wordplay between David and Throat.

‘I ignored my own advice about letting people do what they want and asked Throat if he didn’t think this new job of his was moving too fast too hard.

‘“It’s a career.”’

It must be noted that There is No Decent Place to Stand is yet another literary home run for the Moncton-based Galleon Books. While this little outlier of a publisher takes pride in the diversity of the books it puts out – from highly imaginative speculative fiction to screwball sci-fi, from novellas of nightmarish humanity to socially-aware story collections, from intellectually challenging poetry to straight commercial novels. I consider Jeremiah Prenn’s genre-denying, language-driven, hard-edged gem of a novel to be a winning example of the kind of whip-smart, cynically compassionate, roller-coaster read that represents what Galleon does best. Highly recommended.

About the Author

Jeremiah Prenn is the author of The Sieve, which received a recommended review from Kirkus.com. He has had work published in several literary magazines. When not writing, he’s hiking, or regretting that he’s not hiking. Jeremiah lives in Meridian, Idaho.

About the Reviewer

Steven Mayoff is a Canadian novelist, poet, and lyricist living on Prince Edward Island. His most recent book is the revised edition of his poetry collection Swinging Between Water and Stone (Galleon Books, 2025). Upcoming are the novel Poor Man’s Opera to be published by Galleon Books later this year, and the two thematically linked novellas At the Mercy of Our Muses from Lost telegram Press in 2027. His website is www.stevenmayoff.ca

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Galleon Books

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 27 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 268 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 199812231X

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1998122318

Louis J. Robichaud is everywhere in New Brunswick if you know where to look. I grew up in Moncton, and his presence was in everything, from the way our health system had evolved, to the high school nearby that bore his name. Donald J. Savoie, a long-noted scholar in Canadian politics and friend of Robichaud, has referred to Acadians of his generation as one of Louis J. Robichaud’s children. In my own way, decades later, I too am one of his children: every part of my life growing up, and through to choices I’ve made as an adult.

However, I was also a student of Canadian politics, and in particular New Brunswick politics. I’ve read quite a lot about Louis J. Robichaud. Do we need another biography of him? Yes and no. Savoie, in the opening pages of Louis J. Robichaud: A Man for the Moment, states that this is not an impartial biography of Robichaud and offers recommendations for others, which he consulted. As well, he notes there are other works that touch on much of the wider cultural context and the broader history of New Brunswick, which would help readers less familiar with Robichaud and New Brunswick. For me, a person already steeped in this knowledge, I found the work easy to follow and did not require any additional works to build the framing – but others who are not so familiar might need to build up their knowledge for some references and events only mentioned in passing.

Some of these passing references feel like they could have been expanded upon: for example, the creation of Kouchibouguac National Park after Robichaud made a well-placed comment to the feds. To this day, there’s controversy and generational pain of the eviction of long-term residents, many of them Acadian. It feels odd to brush that aside in a biography of a titan of Acadie.

I digress. If you’re already familiar with Robichaud, this will not add much to your knowledge, though it provides a nice update to his life and memory, as told through the eyes of a prominent Acadian scholar. That alone is certainly worth something. Savoie, as ever, is an elegant storyteller, and I appreciated his insights into Robichaud, as a person who has both studied his impact on New Brunswick and knew Robichaud personally. There is a privilege in getting to a point in your life where you can simply write the scholarly books you want, and so we benefit from Savoie’s clear joy at getting to lay out his friend’s life and oversized impact on all New Brunswickers. At junctures in the book, I felt like Savoie was less interested in finer points he would reference, such as the challenges of a young Acadian family living in Frederiction in the 1960s, as had to happen when Robichaud was elected premier, and far more interested in the large legend. And yet the finer points build up to the legend.

If anything, while this doesn’t offer anything new to the discourse about Robichaud – which admittedly, has long been settled for most New Brunswickers – this was a nice journey back to the reforms which have shaped the province. It’s always beneficial to return to thew roots of the systems in which you participate, and to see how they got from initial conception to the present-day, and where things may have faltered or lost their way.

In the last chapter of the book, we move from Robichaud’s life to whether we could ever have a Robichaud again. Savoie argues that it is not likely, or would be multiple people at minimum, and even then, the world has changed significantly. I disagree, if only because I think it’s folly to say something will never happen again, which is my millennial prerogative and also extensive experience in my short little life. But then again, I’m young enough to still have a decently long future ahead of me. Our next Robichaud will look different, no doubt, but will there be one? Time will tell, as we barrel towards newer, thornier tipping points.

About the Author

Donald J. Savoie holds the Clément-Cormier Research Chair in Economic Development at the Donald J. Savoie Institute. He is the author of numerous books including Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service.

About the Reviewer

Alison Manley is a writer, artist, reader, and librarian currently living in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Her many interests include New Brunswick politics, and after a stint working in hospital libraries in NB, she is now a cataloguing librarian at Saint Mary’s University. You can find her in her garden with her cat Toasted Marshmallow.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McGill-Queen’s University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Feb. 17 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0228027101

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0228027102

Some years ago, one of our local political candidates posted an article about renovictions to their social media, declaring themselves shocked—shocked!—to learn of this practice. Personally, I was a bit shocked that any political hopeful would not have heard of renovictions, though to be fair, the term wasn’t really applicable in our jurisdiction at the time because the Yukon still had “no cause” evictions, obviating the necessity for renovation theatre when removing a tenant.

For the record, “renoviction” refers to the practice of serving a tenant with an eviction notice for the ostensible purpose of renovating their rental unit. In Ontario at least, there is a provision that the tenant is supposed to have “right of first refusal” to move back into the unit at the conclusion of renovations with no increase in their rent. In practice, it’s tough to find a place to live for the unknown amount of time that renovations are going to take, and having moved in the interim it’s relatively rare for tenants to attempt to move back. Even if they do, the courts have not consistently upheld their rights in the matter.

Cole Webber and Philip Zigman have undertaken an intensive study of renovictions in the city of Toronto, which forms the basis of their book Renoviction and Resistance in the Capitalist City. While the details of Toronto renovictions may hinge on specifics like N-13 notices, the mechanics of the practice are the same across the country. Webber and Zigman provide documentation that renoviction is rarely about renovations, and is primarily a means to raising rents.

This is made crystal clear in the prospectus provided to investors by some of the real estate companies that specialize in renoviction. In Ontario, rental increases for sitting tenants are capped, but there is no limit on the amount that rent can be increased for new, incoming tenants, so the fastest way to raise rents is to turn over the unit. Even in Québec, where rental increases are theoretically capped for the unit regardless of changes in tenancy, Webber and Zigman note that “average asking rents for vacant units in Montreal … increased 71 percent” based on 2019 data.

It’s very difficult for prospective tenants to challenge rental rates based on information they don’t typically have about the amount paid by the previous occupant. Under conditions of rental scarcity, few are likely to raise arguments about the terms of a lease they haven’t yet signed.

Many of the tenants interviewed by Webber and Zigman reported that their landlords neglected routine maintenance in the run-up to renoviction. The corresponding decline in the safety and comfort of the residence was one factor spurring tenants to depart “voluntarily.” Some tenants reported various forms of harassment such as receiving frequent inspection notices, being approached repeatedly to ask about their plans to move out, or having disruptions in their utilities such as electrical or water supply. Multi-unit buildings may be turned into a construction site, with attendant noise and safety issues for remaining residents. All in all, the stress of feeling unwelcome in one’s home can be enough to pressure renters into leaving, rather than trying to stay and fight the eviction. These tactics also make it less likely that the tenants will seek to return once renovations are complete.

The strategy that Webber and Zigman recommend for tenants facing renoviction is to organize; that is, “talk to their neighbours at their building, share information, and begin to make decisions together how to act as a group to improve their conditions.” Where the purpose of renovictions is effectively to empty the building of its current occupants as a means to realizing substantially higher rents across the board, landlords may reconsider. If it becomes clear that a large proportion of tenants will resist departure. Webber and Zigman present cases where organized tenants have successfully stopped renovictions from happening in their buildings, usually at an early stage in the process before things have gone to a hearing at the Landlord and Tenant Board.

Webber and Zigman conclude with a blistering critique of governmental policy responses to renoviction, finding these to have been largely ineffective in protecting tenants. In fact, they would argue “that the social democratic approach to the state is inadequate for understanding how the state responds to class struggles over housing. Historically, the Canadian state has accommodated its interventions in the housing field to the imperative of rent extraction.” The authors also hold NGOs accountable for diverting social energy into lobbying for policy reforms that have ultimately proven unhelpful, and thereby shoring up a rigged system.

Having been a renter myself for much of my adult life, I’d say the most difficult aspect is the uncertainty—never being sure that your home won’t be pulled out from under you through no fault of your own. Renoviction and Resistance in the Capitalist City speaks to a particular set of mechanisms that operate to generate housing instability. Within its 140 pages, it provides renters with confirmation that they are not alone in their difficulties, and offers a plan for how they might collectively hold their ground.

About the Author

Philip Zigman is a co-creator of RenovictionsTO.

Cole Webber is a community legal worker at Parkdale Community Legal Services in Toronto.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Between the Lines

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 16 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 176 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771136995

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771136990

As Western societies face renewed appeals to traditional values — in politics, in religion, in public policy — Stephanie Wyeld’s debut novel arrives as an almost uncomfortably pressing work of literary witness. The Book of Maggie opens and closes with a pastor being shot at a pro-choice rally inspired by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. How does a society arrive at such a moment? Wyeld shows us that it’s been heading there for over a generation. The novel’s conclusion feels both like a tragic inevitability and, at every stage, entirely preventable. That tension is the engine of the book, and Wyeld never lets it rest.

Wyeld’s novel follows Maggie’s coming of age in Pentioch, a fictional Ontario bedroom community, circa 1984, where a small fundamentalist church, a tight-knit neighbourhood, and a pastor’s household form one closed system. She is named for Mary Magdalene, a woman whose testimony was edited out of scripture and whose reputation was edited into something more manageable by the institutions that feared her authority. Wyeld does not labour the parallel. Maggie’s only acknowledgement of her namesake is a recurring, breezy aside — she was named, she says, “after a whore” — delivered so lightly that it lands first as a joke.

But those little jokes accumulate, and each repetition makes it harder to laugh and easier to see what has always been operating beneath the surface: the same misogynist agenda that diminished Mary Magdalene’s role in the Bible, from one of Christ’s closest confidants to a cautionary footnote, infects every area of Maggie’s life. Wyeld trusts readers to draw the connection, which is characteristic of her method — precise and unhurried, making the invisible forces of patriarchy materialize with remarkable lightness of touch.

Maggie’s voice is distinctive and disarming: wry, clear-eyed, mordantly funny about things that are not remotely funny. She watches her worth get appraised in the only currencies her community accepts — beauty, fertility, composure, loyalty — and narrates the process with the dark precision of someone who has understood the game far longer than she has been permitted to say so. There is something almost unbearable about her clarity. She sees the walls closing in, names them, often brilliantly — and what does the naming change? Wyeld vividly depicts Maggie’s expansive and witty interior life, and then shows, methodically, how every institution around her conspires to deny that it exists. The accumulation lands with the weight that only quiet, incremental losses can produce.

Nowhere is this pain clearer than in her marriage to Patrick. What Wyeld renders is an erosion: the passionate lovemaking of their honeymoon becomes, through years of failed conception, something functional and joyless — a duty performed on behalf of the church, her body administered rather than inhabited. Nothing violent happens. Nobody raises their voice. Everything proceeds, politely and systematically, until Maggie has been reduced to a chalk outline of herself, all of her contours carefully rubbed away.

Pentioch is a microcosm of the patriarchal institutions that govern society, including the legal and mental health industries and a broader culture of shame deployed as social control. Maggie’s sister’s manageable anxiety is weaponized against her in a custody battle. Her mother has already fled, an earlier casualty of the same logic. Constraints stack on one another, the domestic and the political clicking together with inexorable, elegantly rendered precision. Wyeld never overstates the connections. She doesn’t need to. The architecture of Maggie’s universe speaks for itself.

When the narrative loops back, at the close, to that rally and the gunshot that opened the book, the circularity lands as a verdict. The overturning of Roe was a destination, and Maggie’s entire life is the map. We have watched a woman be erased, piece by piece, from her family, her marriage, her body, her faith, and her own sense of reliable selfhood. The surprise ending reinforces that trajectory. And confirmation, here, is its own form of grief.

A striking debut. Wyeld has the comic touch to make The Book of Maggie as readable as it is disturbing, and the structural discipline to make it devastating — making the ugliest of patriarchy’s attitudes visible with such lightness and control that you barely notice, until you do, and then you see them everywhere.

About the Author

STEPHANIE WYELD was raised in various fundamentalist churches. Though she parted ways with them as an adult, the Christian guilt creeps in now and again. Stephanie has a couple of degrees, in science and engineering, and lives with her family in Toronto. She is a past writer-in-residence at Heliconian Club. The Book of Maggie is her debut novel.

About the Reviewer

EZRA ANDERSON is a writer and bookseller based in Toronto.

Book Details

• Publisher: Dark Winter Press

• March 2026

• Format: Trade Paperback

• Pages: 332

• ISBN: 9781998441419

• Price: $19.99 CAD

In A Change of Plans, we return to Grand Bank, Newfoundland, to a new adventure with Sgt. Winston Windflower. As a light mystery, the novel provides dramatic tension without resorting to graphic detail, although the events that unfold are quite believable. Followers of the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series will rejoin Windflower and his family, administrative staff and blueberry muffin supplier Betsy, the sincere and kindly Corporal Gupta, and many more familiar faces. Although Sanjay, Windflower’s good friend, is no longer with us physically, he does appear in Windflower’s dreams, and this is comforting to us as well as to Windflower.

This time, the action opens with a hit-and-run of a local person, Melinda Barry, who married well during university days, but left her spouse to come home and live on her own terms. As is ever the case, much lies behind the event, for Melinda is already suspected of prostitution and drug trafficking. Thoughts turn to the possibility of murder. As Windflower and his team explore the situation, the depths of the problems infiltrating the community become evident. This is not simple drug possession or personal trafficking; there are connections stemming from the cartels in Mexico. The body count rises.

The drug connection takes a while to sort out. Initially, one of the seemingly smaller players agrees to provide evidence in return for a deal, but the terms of the deal are violated. A sting operation goes badly wrong, and a tense situation, which Windflower is helpless to control, develops. We wait with him, hoping for a favourable outcome. Things are not as they seem, and we tense with our protagonist, waiting for the outcome.

Mike Martin manages to deliver a well-paced, suspenseful plot with plenty of action without dwelling on depravity or carnage. This is due to the characters and their response to any situation. Windflower is well-grounded in the Seven Teachings and lives by them in his prayer time, his family time, and his times of crisis. He begins the day with prayers and smudging, finds time for his family and the pets that are part of their home, cherishes his wife as a loving partner and independent human being, walks in nature and meditates when hard decisions must be made, or when the only thing to do is wait. He visits those who are alone. As a dream weaver taught by his aunt and uncle, he receives the dreams that are given him and learns from them. He finds joy in family moments and takes pleasure in creating meals for those he loves. And yet, he is not idealized; he misses those he has lost and struggles when his friends are in danger. He reacts as we would like to, with a dignity we can admire. He is a role model that can inspire us, but not a superhero; we can look at him and day, “I could be like that.”

His daughters have grown up just a little, and the parenting challenges we anticipated in earlier works begin to manifest. Specifically, daughter Stella must have a phone, and resisting her takes all the skill her parents can bring to bear together. Windflower’s wife, ever patient, humorous, and wise, stands with him and understands him as a partner, a parent, and a person. She is firm but fair with her children, her stance ever framed by love.

In any cozy mystery, food and its preparation occupy a central place, and that is true here. In the Windflower mysteries, though, I find a realistic approach—foods are substantial and prepared with care, but they are not impossible concoctions. In other words, the recipes described are something that I could do; they are not miles above me. I wanted to take notes and try some of these. The inclusion of family time and cooking time reduces the intensity of the read, creating a yearning to read more while also providing moments of relaxation. Although the denouement is long, it provides satisfying details and we can still find enjoyment. We emerge from the reading experience refreshed, not agitated.

The novel can be read as a stand-alone, as the author fills in enough background details to give us understanding. At the same time, observing the character evolution over several books is beneficial, and is also a good course of action. Once again, Mike Martin draws on the warmth of Windflower’s Cree heritage, portraying a well-rounded man, a humble and honest man, a respectful cop and a loyal friend, and places him in a well-developed story, surrounded by love. All the ingredients we need for a satisfying and relaxing read.

About the Author

Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada and around the world.

About the Reviewer

Anne M. Smith-Nochasak grew up in rural western Nova Scotia, where she currently teaches part-time after years in northern communities. She has self-published four novels with Friesen Press: A Canoer of Shorelines (2021), The Ice Widow (2022), and two books in the Taggak Journey trilogy: River Faces North (2024) and River Becomes Shadow (2025). A member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, Anne enjoys incorporating local settings into her writing. In her spare time, she likes reading, kayaking, gardening, renovating, and exploring the woods with her golden dog, Shay, while her cat, Kit Marlowe, oversees the house. Anne can be contacted through her website. https://www.acanoerofshorelines.com/

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ottawa Press and Publishing Mystery

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 18 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 268 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1990896391

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1990896392

The Kabbalah in British Columbia

“… what does the mountain care?”

Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto” (1855)

The title of Tim Lilburn’s latest collection of poetry sounds (like) itself: an initial short “o” in volcano erupts to a series of longer o’s in its final syllable and in “snow note” which is held in check by its “high held” alliteration. This note may be held near the summit or for longer beats of breathing at various altitudes and attitudes: To hold the note is to behold it and to be beholden to it in an aesthetics of apprehension. This arresting phrase appears in “Controlled Burn Theurgy,” a poem in three scenes, the first one from the beginning of the pandemic. If theurgy is the practice of turning the soul around, then Lilburn’s poetry enacts Neoplatonic theurgy in bridging the human and divine. The poem urges and refrains streams of nature, language, and consciousness: “A stream flows out of the head of the mountain.” This mountain is a landmark on Lilburn’s horizon and becomes human in his interaction with it. The stream gathers lava and layers of pandemic in the rest of the poem: “The stream white waters hummingbirds,” their flutter sounding the surrounding air, spreading virally from the volcano’s unsung scream. “A stream out of oaks / Mouth-banked below-the- / tongue slither.” The poet banks his hyphens, and this sublingual tributary is also subliminal in its suggestion of medication during Covid.

“Inaugural / river saying, saying.” From source to mouth the river repeats its saying to flow into a longer sentence without end stop:

Worded, a stream comes out of the head

of stone cliffs

and from the red moon

bulbing from earth near the volcano

and the volcano’s high held snow note.

Stone cliffs participate in the dialogue between poet and nature, while an ominous red moon witnesses virus and volcano, bubbling as well as bulbing. “Language of stream” is the medium through which the poet listens to lines, colours, and distances. Bird, stream, and mountain are worded in the lava of language; and red moon continues its wound as “Red moonlight gash on winter Haro Strait.” This outpouring of flora and fauna turns to camouflage “stream of deer / colour of waterlogged wood,” out of sound and sight. “Language here plucked” doubles to hear in the pluck of flower and string instruments toward “Stream of whales, drift logs” in the current of waterlogged wood. These logs drift to a prayer for family members during the pandemic and the “souls’ waves.” From whale songs to souls’ waves the poem reverts to birds: “Hummingbirds’ hammering stream in mountain thought.” The mountain’s head is capable of thinking in the poet’s singing which turns from the plural of hummingbirds to “Hummingbird in armament and language” – its strength measured in hammering armament against a pandemic.

This scene ends with Edenic apple trees: “The breasts of apple trees / send light paths.” Having given thought and voice to the mountain and its inhabitants, the poet enters into dialogue with the body of landscape, so that streams flow in both directions between humans and nature. Birds and bees find succour in trees, which are palpated by the poet’s keen stethoscope. What he hears is “language’s stalking shimmer / And bees coursing to apple tree breasts.” Unseen, the virus stalks the universe while a bee-loud glade offers some remedy.

His shimmer of language enters Scene Two as he worries about hummingbirds in the cold of February: “ice spears / rattling in the feeder.” If spears belong to the bird’s armament, then rattle reminds us of the snake in the apple garden and other unseen pandemic threats. Bird plural is reduced to “one, male, locked, staring out / of creeping torpor.” Commas lock in monosyllables before branching outward – a tension in slow motion that contrasts with the usual rapid flutter of wings. Pacific Gothic creeps “in gravid darkening / perched on a stick.” Stick returns to spears, while female gravid interacts with the single male before “the fluorescent explosion window,” which enters the poet’s winter dream: “a doe / noses out a route / behind the kitchen cupboards / and forces her neck and head / through a gap.” From mountain to kitchen to doe head, the dream verges on surrealism in the gap of consciousness. The poet strokes the doe’s throat. “The new country stands quivering / Its black eye is thrown over me.” Either doe eye or eye of country, the poet is covered and wounded in its tarp and trap. “The breasts of apple trees: send light / paths.” And the stream returns as well. “The star flows / send language / as bees make an attempt at apple tree / breasts.” These breasts nurture nature in this tree-loud glade: birds breathe trees breathe birds in the unseen photosynthesis of the sublime.

Scene Three shifts from dream to prayer, as the poet sits atop a box of unsold copies of his book, “Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy.” Unsold and unsung, this book in the basement sits “at the tail / end of prayer” and has much to recommend it. On its cover Chinese characters descend vertically to intersect with Greek words in Lilburn’s bilingual poetry and philosophy. His prayer for family and dream of a sleepy Odysseus include the eros of apple trees and snow-streaked mountain, “which asserts its rise / to roost in me.” From basement to streak and stream, rise and roost, the poet groans and shuffles his feet to repeat his conclusion:

The mountain is dark

The mountain is dark

(fire sent into fire)

Its light is dark

beaming ray of its ceremonies

The poet opens his ear from the great above to the great below, repeats his brooding darkness, and celebrates ceremonies of light beams. His parenthetic fire is contained in controlled burn, the mountain’s hard gemlike flame, the stream’s theurgy turning the soul. The high held snow note is a torch to light the horizon and listen to its voices; his encounter with the sublime wounds and heals. (Apokatastasis, apodictic, and epektatic – a Greek flotilla in Lilburn’s lexical odyssey.)

The opening poem, “Now, He Thinks,” raises questions about Lilburn’s high held snow notes. “The child puts up his hand / to stand as an ear vortexing / over rising basalt.” This initial gesture seems to imply that the child wishes to answer a question, but his act is an aural one reflected in rhyme of hand and stand, and sound of “vortexing over rising” in his climb to the sublime. “What else?” pulses through the brief poem in concert with “rising” between basalt and Mars. Another question at the poem’s centre – “Can anything more winningly blue / come his way?” – is answered in “He’s in.” The child is in the poem even as the poem resides in him. He is a notetaker of afternoons, high held notes, and Mars rising – languid time and planetary rotation. Waiting for the second “What else?”, he “hunches / near the biggest oak / and takes his time.” He stethoscopes the oak and takes its pulse through thinking. The biggest oak puts the child in his place, reducing the ego in supplication before it rises through time and attention. In pursuit of the sublime, the child’s reach exceeds his grasp.

Three stanzas of “Cold” introduce a hummingbird companion and form a sonnet for its feeder. “Matted snow with hard crust / unfolds, linen cloth, on the west face.” Long o’s enact that unfolding, paused in commas, and further arrested in crust and west. Matted prepares for mated in male, monstrous, and magical, while west gives direction, and face personifies the landscape in preparation for dialogic encounter. The scene unfolds “the male hummingbird broken / from sleep, its seal, / stilled at the just thawed feeder.” Like his weary Odysseus, Lilburn’s sleep-laden creatures awaken from sonneted sibilance of seal, stilled, snow.

The second stanza personifies snow: “Final dark, snow / breathes down between monstrous firs, / the cat door in the shed blocked by snow / and the death seven years ago of the ingenious cat.” If the hummingbird’s sleep is the first seal, then the cat’s door and death are the second blockage. The poet listens to the snow’s breathing and bird’s beating, while gargantuan trees contrast with a diminished shed; and that dimensional contrast induces a feeling of the sublime wherein inhalation becomes inspiration, view becomes vision and voice, and awe is embedded in thawed feeder.

In the final stanza the dialogue between poet and bird develops sublime meaning and moral of the fable: “I speak the magical language to the male / to warm him.” Magical language from the first two stanzas carries through to the final sentence, which points to the visual interplay among poet, sleepy bird, and dead cat that no longer poses a threat to its prey in a domestic wilderness. “Puffed, enflamed / on the dead cedar branch, his eye on me and / the door from where comes / anagogic liquid.” Dead branch contrasts with majestic firs and interacts with the dead cat, while cat’s door contrasts with the bird’s doorless feeder. Anagogic liquid feeds levels of interpretation and mountain gradation, even as the poet warms his hummingbird in “Cold.” Lilburn’s ventriloquism speaks Greek, Indigenous, and nature’s dialect to nourish moods and puff matted surroundings.

“Little Greeting” measures a smallness in two sentences that make do without verbs because of their overriding Imagism: “Angel of the cliff rock, mirabundus, / with another language.” Angel’s wings may belong to bird, tree, or spirit of place in the astonishment of Latin, the other language. This angelic creature possesses a “mind of rotting pink, / ironwood of shag bloom, / speech, rilling acetylene feather.” If rotting pink is not quite an oxymoron, then acetylene feather renders it more so, with rilling engaging rotting. A sibilance of speech forms part of the greeting, while long i’s gather at the end of the poem to greet the reader in a repeated mindset: “sent mind / of the oak, the red vein / in blue spruce in cool, dry July. / The oak, its eyes.” Eyes of oak, bird, and spirit greet and witness this audiovisual experience.

“Then” is another little greeting in two stanzas that look back to this volume’s first poem, “Now, He Thinks,” in Lilburn’s temporal rhythms and moods of now and then. “Here is where you were coming back then / pocked, black-purple Big Quill Lake, wind-accordioned.” Words water through monosyllables until elongated in accordioned – its long sound and visual ripple. A correspondent breeze harps Lilburn’s coloured lake quilled in ink. “To enlist here in the early fall / was the plan.” If “here” repeats the first word of place and presence, and “enlist” prepares for lists that follow, then “fall” is both seasonal and part of the poet’s tumbling descents. “Lodged, javelin forehead / driven, in a slope dug-out.” Lodged is a dwelling both temporary and permanent, the javelin pointing back to quill and forward to dugout. Split into the second-person pronoun, the poet is “clothed and bedded with echoing damp / and roots inches up from halitotic water.” Echoing reverts to accordioned, while halitotic carries breathing forward to “swans swaying in.” The stanza concludes in a mood of witnessing and a suggestion of cosmic sublime through sentences without verbs: “Eye houses everywhere. / Nights in the mouths of stars.”

The second stanza offers a final hyphen to go along with the earlier ones: “You’d live in the processional slough- / edge ground below a door opening upward / to Orion’s belt.” This processional is ceremonial in sound from houses to mouths and slough, as well as directional between below and upward to stars whose mouths contrast with fauna drinking at the end: “elk and deer drinking in the crusty shore, / no sickness in their bodies. That / mist coming off them.” Enlisting the mist, healthy animals partake of the mystery surrounding them, inhaling and imbibing the notes of Orion and accordion.

The shortest poem in this collection, “How It Would Be,” consists of three haiku lines alternating monosyllables and disyllabic words in Imagistic rhythm: “Wolves and silence. / Hungry star. A second or third / winter on the tip of your tongue.” Sounds between wolves and silence enter the mouths of stars and the poet’s linguistic time span, filling in the title of how it would be. This brief tercet leads to the two stanzas of “I Have Oats,” which head in a downward direction, a decline of the sublime: “Stars tendril nearer, droop. Malice.” Shooting stars drop and stop in sentences. A polluted landscape is ominous: “Two-man-height high tires, industrial, flake down / on a beach south of Campbell River.” High tires replace high tides: “three or four bolted together, green-brown bilge sways / in the troughs.” Monosyllabic numbers and colours are bolted together by hyphens that accentuate the ups and downs of sludge at river’s edge.

“Stone-voiced wind” accordions the river which is further sounded in tree and tire: “A cedar branch slide shrieking / along an eave.” The first stanza ends by guttering evening to eave to prepare for night vision in the second stanza. “I set it down: I have the farm of 3:00 a.m.; / I have the Zoharic field of weeping, dipping oats.” The poet sets the scene down in words and experience. His simple verbs are loaded: to have the farm and Zohar is to possess vision rather than ownership of property. To have and to hold are key aesthetic experiences for Lilburn who laments “how little / I have in my head,” even while he holds oaks and oats. Like his weary and weeping Odysseus, the poet is awake in the middle of the night when the mystical light of the Zohar and Zodiac have him enthralled. Amid drooping oats an epiphany of rhyming monosyllables of stone and oats: “All true. / But who to say this to?” This rhetorical question is addressed to the reader before the concluding mood sets in: “Snow cutting from the north. / Geese and moon. / Sea lions change sentries.” Snow scythes oats, the moon joins star tendrils, and sea lions change watchful guards at 3:00 a.m. An aesthetics of apprehension leans on have and hold.

The Zohar reappears in “The Massinahican Streaks Out!” which refers to Louis Riel’s lost cosmology. “Floating masses of text, coagulations, / train cars, thrown, moving at bulking speed, / bending as gusts of crows.” Sibilants coalesce, as do bulking and bending, while masses sing Massinahican, the Cree book or bible. A gathering of esoteric texts follows: “Massinahican, Zohar, The Hidden Eyes of Things, / Roberto Harrison’s Tecumseh Republic” – rivers of vision that streak out. Thought quickens and thickens in the mix of Indigenous and Greek texts whose polysyllables streak out: “Look into the pot they carry inside their quickness, / a simmer, cherry pitch of apokatastasis.” Poetic restoration occurs between pot and pitch, carry and cherry. A Sufi book of wisdom joins this surge – Fusus al-hikam. “Venus in the east” is the first cosmic direction to be followed by other cosmic pulls: “We / meet ourselves in this speed / as north Pacific beaches west of Bear Beach, breakers / knuckling on high shore walls, / fern waving part way up toward us and through us.” Streaking covers four corners from bulking speed to meeting speed through us in floating kabbalistic signifiers and cosmological occultation.

The Zohar streaks out again in “What to Do with the Coral Rose?” as the poet interacts with nature and centuries-old texts: “Some sort of / Zoharic cone-like room of branches exists in the further back of forest.” Sharing a room with Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” Lilburn’s kabbalistic cone branches and breathes from the beginning engagement with a ninth-century Irish monk: “Alright, ok, Eriugena – I wish he could or would visit / the poor sick coral rose, its pocked astral faces – wants a sticking.” This opening familiar address abruptly shifts to a lesser-known addressee, the author of “Periphyseon” mentioned in the final sentence: “I wish Eriugena would spread the food of just speeches over the / poor coral rose.” From the start, the poem spreads speeches of wisdom and music in unifying strains that interlace with the impoverished coral rose – normally a symbol of gratitude and happiness. Astral faces prepare for cosmic and dialogic elements in the rest of the poem – “unioned / (with God) cosmos (adunatio), a Port Mann Bridge breath.” He bridges Hebraic and classical roots of Percy Shelley’s “Adonais,” attuned to adunatio.

The poet sticks Vancouver’s bridge to cosmic at-onement, Hebrew for God’s name, and Kabbalah in British Columbia. The local bridge breathes under his stethoscope “joining individuated heat with the beyond- / intelligence torch” – light and life of Zohar’s radiant tree. This wisdom torch sweeps a web from nature’s secretions. After these luminescent threads, the poet returns to his opening ok: “That’s alright, fine, I would go for a little breath myself, ripple, / an absorption.” The self’s diminished breath exhales to the larger bridge’s breath and beyond to a cosmic “taste of limitlessness” through a tripled “mouth, mouth / mouth” that goes beyond dialogue: “The Periphyseon is in dialogue.” In contrast to acedia where “nothing nudges,” Eriugena’s Periphyseon is polyphonic “launched like a city / of burrowing rodents, spiritual conversation, so, thus, too, an air- / seeking assemblage crowned with rotors that / whip and nip at rising.” This spiralling surrealism reaches upward with rotors of rodents.

The poem’s final section switches from Neoplatonic text to Indigenous language: “When you speak SENCOTEN to the young, or even older deer / they stop their flight and turn to look at you.” Human being and deer have slipped behind a doorless wall with the Zohar’s Tree of Life and light from boxwood to “love-lit boxwood.” Lilburn’s “further back forest” is a “castle of web / and feather, home-heap of speech and light wind.” The wind lights, the breeze breathes, and dialogue ensues: “The animals see you. You swell from their seeing.” Home-heap of speech and swelling seeing return to the Periphyseon: “I wish Eriugena would spread the food of just speeches over the / poor coral rose.” Lilburn’s philosophy nurtures nature and spreads speech of Greek, Latin, and SENCOTEN.

The Zohar makes a final appearance in “No Untrue Philosophy Reaches –” where a red room takes over from the earlier Zoharic room. Undo the double negatives so that true philosophy reaches the special room, “tongued from a second place, thick / with covenanted mountain ranges.” Covenanted Sinai as a second place spreads to the Rockies and ranges farther west: “coastal, reached only by under-rain logging roads.” Like have and hold, reach doubles as physical and metaphysical goal in an aesthetics of apprehension, just as under-rain locates its philosophical counterpart in untrue. The natural world prepares for the supernatural: “drifting through / dripping, charcoal fir, west shore, Vancouver Island.” From that under-rain dripping, an arrival at the sublime: “a silo of ridgelines of 14,000 foot / quiet.” Nature’s immensity leads to philosophic speculation once more in a via negativa: “Nothing true / that does not reach / a metaphysics of ecstasy.” Long rhyming e’s extend vision and voice.

The second stanza picks up those long e’s of philosophy and melody: “To see or have graze your arm skin / dust of melodic orbital ringing.” Which further opens to antique texts and pilgrimages from Mazdean Iran to Ibn ‘Arabi’s Sufis of Andalusia to the Zohar. “Ibn ‘Arabi, feet afloat, touches down along the light over-boil African / north rim.” This long line mirrors the third line of the first stanza in its geographic stretch, and echoes “under-rain” with “over-boil” and 14,000 foot with feet afloat. The poem pilgrimages from British Columbia to North Africa to Spain in peregrinations of thought and thinking. After Ibn ‘Arabi we alight in Castille, “rustle of the Companions’ talk.” These Companions are the disciples of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai in the Zohar, “their own feet on roads’ stones or inns’ stairs / or up to the ankle in garden soil / of 3:30 a.m. where they meet.” Between feet and meet, roads’ stones and earlier “minus stone,” meetings take place in the middle of the night when history regresses to biblical origins: “King David, the donkey driver, / who informs them they are the Lower Reaches / of Eden.” Lilburn’s philosophy reaches from feet to summit in the sublime encounters of minds, as he transplants Eden to Vancouver Island.

The third stanza migrates across mythologies to return home. With their own volcanic structures “Emerald cities rise and vibrate.” Broken-hearted winds sound these coloured cities and celestial earth: “Our highest in-skinned, below / bone drama-ear.” These hyphens shrink the long dash in the poem’s tilts to reach inward and rhyme ear, here, and deer – “each with their own apartment here.” Subjectivity, snowberry, and blackberries coalesce in volcanic eruption with its anagogic lava: “Trembling emanation / cooling, colouring as it passes.” This emanation ends in “exposed rock” in contrast to “in-skinned.”

The final stanza’s stethoscope breathes, beginning with “The ravens squeal to their young, / the percussive small birds.” The poet percusses nature where birds breathe trees, and the angel’s trumpet is both flower and sound of breathing astonishment. “Seraphiel / handles the great horn / of flesh and intelligence.” The verb not only alliterates with horn, but it also resonates with have and hold to apprehend a cosmic poetic. “The Eighth climate” refers to Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth but also takes on an added measure of urgency in today’s climate. A two-year-old buck witnesses “a four-century sleep.” The final sentence offers up another bird nesting over wider meanings: “Wide leaves, floppy maple, / fallen over the dome / of the bush tits’ scrotal nest laced to the California lilac / safe from last night’s north wind.” From west shore to north wind, south climes, and easterly origins, philosophy reaches far and wide. Philosopher’s stone and rock face hold their breathing across sentences and stanzas. Between Eden and British Columbia, Lilburn’s verse erupts with molten music and metaphysics from summits’ sublime to anagogic undercurrents of birds and Zoharic trees of radiant life.

About the Author

Tim Lilburn lives in the Bowker Creek watershed in W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Vancouver Island. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, and has been the poetry editor for Grain and was one of the founders of Jackpine Press.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature. He has published over 300 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Sept. 22 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 104 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771026587

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771026584

There are two kinds of books I find difficult to review: those I don’t like, and those that I do. New Brunswick is the latter. It’s intimidating to corrall a response within a rhetorical framework of 900 rather feeble words. I had the same problem with Shane Neilson’s more recent book-length poem The Reign. It’s obviously freakin’ fantastic—now, how to say more than, “This is freakin’ fantastic?”

New Brunswick, Neilson’s fifth poetry collection which was released in 2019, spans 87 pages. Within those pages is contained some vast phenomenon, like the sky. How would you review the sky? How would you review the actual province of New Brunswick?

Of course, people are happy to review the province of New Brunswick. I turn to Reddit for assistance, where I learn that New Brunswick is beautiful but dead, that it’s “life in the slow lane” with shitty healthcare and “nice but somewhat judgy” locals , that it’s underrated and “the best kept secret in Canada.” The “beautiful but dead” part suits a discussion of Shane Neilson’s New Brunswick, because the man can turn a gorgeous phrase, and he directs this poetic skill towards a dialogue with his own dead—his mother, buried where “mustard seed got choked / by conglomerate needs that punished the small,” and his father, an old-school patriarch of the fist-thumping variety.

“First / principle: there is no end to life if life consists / of conversations with the dead,” writes Neilson in the long poem “Broken Crown on the Neilson Family Table”. And, later in the piece:

“Pain was a process meant for use. Ab is Semitic for father.

Ab          use

use

use

less

The tabletop focuses on fields fronting rusted-out

cars that sink into differgreening earth. I know

this place, but in case, I cross myself—the sign

a marker of my displacement.”

This curious formation, “differgreen”, also occurs near the end of the poem about his mother’s gravesite: “But look— / in the field, see wounds the mortgage / might heal. Land remains, awaiting the farmer / of future nostalgias. Mom, I miss you. / This differgreen is slow, wild, beautiful assertion.”

In quoting these parallel passages I would draw attention to formal features that texture Neilson’s poems. Firstly, there is his use of rhyme within or across lines, as in “this place, but in case” or “in the field … / might heal.” Secondly, the enjambment that turns a phrase two ways at once, which we see in the transformation of “abuse” into “useless”, and in “the farmer / of future nostalgias.” These two techniques embellish the text with focal points and beats additional to the punctuation and line endings. A third feature, perhaps not a technique per se, is in lines like “This differgreen is slow, wild, beautiful assertion,” a line that seems to mean something, but does not pin down to an obvious, literal rendering as a thing in the world. What’s a differgreen? What is the action of differgreening? How is differgreen assertion? What does it mean to be assertion, as opposed to the active verb form of making an assertion? How might an assertion be slow, wild, beautiful?

This slipperiness is risky; certainly there is much bad poetry out there where meaning remains elusive and vaguely “poetic” diction runs rampant. It’s my feeling, though, that Neilson manages to stay just this side of the meaning-meaninglessness divide. I don’t know what he means, but I feel confident that meaning is there, not to be teased out necessarily, because this is meaning of the kind that doesn’t fit into words and sentences—the kind that can only be gestured at, evoked, made visible though not defined. Neilson tackles questions of saying and sensemaking directly in a shorter poem titled “Edmundston” wherein he states, “Sens, the sense of the poem / is to feel,” and concludes, “For years, I’ve made no sense, / taking pleasure where and when / it comes. The mouth bleeds / through its words, but it speaks.”

Turning back to matters of form, the poems in New Brunswick take a variety of shapes. The opening piece is a three-page timeline of New Brunswick’s history, from 1534 through 2015, listing not the usual names and events but instead marking the years with comments like, “We never knew what we wanted to be,” or simply, “Want:”. This is followed by a historical document, an excerpt from Mascarene’s Treaty of 1725, also known as “Mascarene’s Promises.” Then comes a long poem, followed by a set of shorter, lyric poems, and another long poem broken into shorter numbered sections. The final segment of the book is headed “Loss Sonnets” and is almost but not quite a sonnet cycle. The last line of each of these twelve poems reappears in the first line of the next. Poems average around fourteen lines, but range from twelve to eighteen lines (or twenty-one, depending how you count lines in one of the more sprawling pieces). The sonnet form calls back to history, while its broad reimagining places it in the present.

New Brunswick does this wonderfully, bridging the historical and the present moment within a singular life. It repays attentive reading yet it’s rewarding even without quite understanding everything. I have to stop here so I can be done with this review, but I’m not even close to being done with this book.

About the Author

Shane Neilson was born in New Brunswick. He attended the University of New Brunswick, where he completed his BSc. He obtained his MD from Dalhousie University, his MFA from the University of Guelph, and is currently a PhD candidate at McMaster University. Neilson is the author of five collections of poetry, a two-time winner of the Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year Award, and the 2017 winner of The Walrus Poetry Prize.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Biblioasis

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 21 2019

• Edition ‏ : ‎ Illustrated

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 80 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771963050

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771963053

In this issue:

• Library of Brothel by Anakana Schofield (Fiction)

• A Maestro Act: Review of The Lost Queen by Heidi Von Palleske (Fiction)

• Return to Paueru Gai: Fifty Years of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival (Non-Fiction)

• Walrus: The Remarkable Life of Eco-Warrior David Garrick by Catherine Marie Gilbert (Non-Fiction)

• The Poet’s Cookbook, edited by André Narbonne (Poetry)

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Poetry

Time Enough by Lise Mayne

A good story about a family from the Isle of Man emigrating to the US in the early 1900s searching for a better life for their children. Plenty of adversities to overcome, family issues, and carving out a life in a new country.

Kudos to the author for using different locales, such as the Isle of Man, Michigan, and Manitoulin Island. She also includes details about the immigration process, and getting from Boston to Cheboygan Michigan. Not an easy trip with a large family!

It's a bit too lengthy (almost 500 pages), and would have benefited from aggressive editing to tighten up the manuscript and add some clarity where needed. Very readable, though, and a good historical fiction novel overall. (James M. Fisher)

Contributor News

Seaboard Review contributor Lisa Timpf, along with fellow SF Canada members Paula Johanson and Colleen Anderson, will be co-editing an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry related to sports. With the working title Slapshots in Space and Magical Marathons, the anthology, to be published by Tyche Books, will accept submissions from July 1 to August 31 2026. For those who want to get a start on their submissions, guidelines are now available on Tyche Books’ site, https://tychebooks.com/submissions/.

It's time to celebrate The Fiddlehead's spring issue with another virtual launch!

Join us on Zoom Saturday, June 13 at 7 pm ADT for readings by Melanie Power, winner of the 2025 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and issue 307 contributors Abhimanyu Acharya, Raoul Fernandes, and Christine Stewart-Nuñez!

⭐ To register: Email thefiddlehead@gmail.com with your name and they'll send you the link!

The event is free and open to all, with ASL interpretation available.

It is funded in part by the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Culture NB, and the University of New Brunswick.

Caveat Lecher

The subtitle of Anakana Schofield’s previous book, Bina, is “a novel in warnings,” and any reader of her fiction should be forewarned not to expect traditional plot or character development. Instead, her fiction interrogates an entirely different terrain where originality and inventiveness bend any genre to surprise her reader at every turn of phrase and imaginative leap of direction. A celebrant of strangeness, Schofield has more up her sleeve than tricks turned in her latest novel, Library of Brothel, which displaces the Library of Congress in a different set of categories and classifications. The Library of Brothel has its own house rules, controls, and hierarchies, despite its avowed egalitarian freedom of expression.

At the centre of the book’s worn-looking cover, a four-storey building appears with its many windows of fiction. A pendulum which doubles as a wrecking-ball angles across it to hint at its dilapidation and deconstruction. On the back cover one of its keys in the shape of an E begins the word Enter as the novel invites the reader into its fantasies and absurdities: “Do you want to come in? … Come in …. And in you come.” Her library and brothel are states of mind as much as any physical building or sexual experiences. The novel is structured around three categories – generated, develops, and dies – which appear in its epigraph taken from Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”: “Every amorous episode can be, of course, endowed with a meaning; it is generated, develops and dies; it follows a path which is always possible to interpret according to a causality or a finality – even, if need be, which can be moralized…” And Schofield’s fragmented paths call for interpretation.

First she sets down “House Rules”: “We will kill you before you kill us so conduct yourself accordingly.” Schofield’s wit and humour rely on her rhetorical uses of paraprosdokian – unexpected endings to a sentence’s train of thought. “Do not anticipate anything except intellectual stimulation. Physical contact is at the discretion of your Host. The only thing that’s compulsory for stimulation is the intellect.” And Schofield stimulates the reader’s intellect in each of her rooms and fragments of discourse. “English is not tolerated in the Polyglot Room” – fair enough in this polyphonic bordello with its multilingual Tower of Babel. Pay and play by the rules in her funhouse of fiction: “Pay on arrival. Credit card remains at the Front Desk.”

Although eye contact by Hosts or clients is optional, no hugging is allowed. “No right-handers in the Left-Handed Room” and “No unpublished poetry.” The final forbidden: “No disobeying and no Styrofoam penises in the Dungeon.” This descent into the dungeon of bathos is followed by “An Important Note on Rooms”: “Everyone at the Library of Brothel is inside a room. If you find yourself fambling in our building, please report to the Front Desk or remove yourself via the nearest exit. Random unsanctioned walkers with no booking will be expelled in a most aggressive and painful manner.” Rooms and people are interchangeable, and a footnote to “fambling” explains that it means fannying about or ambling, a portmanteau that applies equally to reader, writer, and client or guest. “Supplication for Curious Minds” also uses a footnote and paraprosdokian: “We beseech you, have the ears open, fists unclenched, and mind ductile when you make inclination towards us. This we ask in the name of the mother, the daughter, the sister and our elderly, erratic furnace.” Under the influence of Borges, Beckett, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and the surrealism of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, the ductile mind is led to a footnote about father before erratic furnace.

“Generated” begins with an etching from Piranesi’s “The Round Tower” in “Imaginary Prisons” – gothic structures that comment on the Library of Brothel and suggest Escher’s surreal stairways. Built in 1898, this Vancouver building is an example of Foucault’s heterotopia – the other space that lies outside of society’s structures and challenges its norms through its strange ceremonies. The Round Tower in the Library of Brothel is both a place of ironic incarceration and a point of observation or panopticon. Another beginning with “Front Step,” for the reader has to hopscotch along a chessboard of false steps and strangeness: “It’s February, a month that has given the city strange and unusual snowfall.” Schofield exploits this strange atmosphere indoors and outdoors. “Inside: Sources say there are workers, furniture, windows, a toilet or two, poor wiring, a bounty of towels, and a particularly difficult-to-find lightbulb that requires bulk import from Argentina.” In her random order of singular and plurals she concludes with imported lightbulbs. “Outside: Rumours.” Between rooms and rumours the reader is caught off guard. “Reputed to be a bawdy house once operated by a short, plumpy woman with surprisingly large feet and a deceased fluffy-necked dog.” Just as we may be surprised by these dimensions and details, so the narrative chess match becomes more complicated, the rhetorical hopscotch more demanding so that it’s not only lightbulbs that are difficult to find: “We don’t care about Short and Plumpy. Not yet. Though she’s still to be found in here.” “Front Step” concludes: “There are the hard-to-shed, and the shedding so hard they are going to be impossible to miss.”

Amid all the digressions and diversions, the novel is also structured around forty-four “cantos” scattered through this Rabelaisian romp. “First Canto” begins: “Let us call it the Library. The Library of Brothel. Our Brothel of Library.” This reversal is indicative of textual instability or arbitrariness: “We’re still deciding which name to give it for you. It doesn’t need to be set, does it?” Once you’ve entered you may peruse Front Desk; Department of Thinking, Dreaming & Recollecting; Main Floor Library; Department of Service, Vigour, Smell & Sample; or Scrabble Room with its metonymy of person and place. “Her name is Scrabble Room. Or Scrabble Woman, for she is a woman, and she is the Scrabble Room compatriot.” The novel does raise questions of gender, and personal pronouns are scattered accordingly. With proper ironic distance Schofield cares about her characters: “We do care about Scrabble Room because without her the Library would have been shuttered years ago.”

Security demonstrates the same level of commitment as Scrabble Room. “There are usually one or two people who keep a place ticking. Remove them and you remove it. Tick, tick, tick.” Schofield keeps place and pace ticking with her linguistic tics and tricks. Amid various classifications sits the Baptismal Font, which allows the novelist to exhibit her humour: “the Baptismal Font was gifted because a priest or two hadn’t settled their bill when the parish church closed at Main and 12^th and as they were relocated to Cape Breton and a suburb of Winnipeg, respectively, they supplied the Baptismal Font in lieu of owed cash for faithfully rendered orgasms, allegedly of the intellect, but more likely it included the nether regions.” Schofield’s satire plays on “faithfully,” and covers east and west coasts as well as nether regions in her roving library.

Paint is another comic character who amends Henry George Room’s hairless lip and gives him a Dali-looking moustache. Outdoor, back-alley escalators ascend to the top floor where Plunkett Snutch lives. In this absurd universe Giraffe Room has vertebrae that are linked to banister and staircase in the building where Schofield is the architect by design. The John Keats Room and Virginia Woolf Room speak for themselves. “Intercourse had become, as usual, surreal and unrelated discourse.” In this Library of Babel, a footnote explains that the word “intercourse” should be “upgraded to twenty-five-person orgies.” Enter the Library of Brothel and stay for wit, sense of humour, and wiser cracks.

About the Author

ANAKANA SCHOFIELD is the author of three acclaimed novels: Bina, Martin John and Malarky. She has been described as “one of Canada’s most stylistically provocative and innovative wordsmiths.” Her novels have won numerous literary awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the Amazon.ca Debut Novel Award. She’s been twice shortlisted for the UK Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Martin John was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2015.
Her essays and columns appear regularly in The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. She’s written for The Guardian, The New York Times The Irish Times and Book Post. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature. He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Canada

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 26 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 272 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735273243

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735273245

Newest on the counter is The Poet’s Cookbook, edited by André Narbonne, illustrated by John Fraser (Conspiracy Press, 2026). It’s fairly slim at 104 pages and B&W and $28.

This is billed as both cookbook and memoir, with twenty-one accomplished authors focusing on their experiences, memories, and stories. The authors included are: Lorna Crozier, Joyce Carol Oates, Dan MacDonald, Gord Grisenthwaite, Collette Broeders, Molly Peacock, Brother Paul Quenon, Marty Gervais, Lesley Choyce, Phil Hall, Tom Wayman, Rosemary Sullivan, Moisés Palmeros (head chef for the Canadiens), Natalie Meisner, Conrad Dippel, Rosemary Sullivan, Peter Hrastovec, Klara Du Plessis, Natalie Meisner, Robert Hilles, Conrad Dippel, Kathy Mac, Renée D. Bondy, and George Elliott Clarke.

By structure, it is more than instruction, and readable, as a memoir slice, or Q&A prefacing the recipe(s) of each. It isn’t organized by courses, which would be complicated since some writers submitted both main course and dessert. There is no index or flag for vegan or vegetarian, or how many hot pepper spicy, but the table of contents does list the recipe titles. Presumably you bookmark or foodmark the ones you will make again.

The priority is on the writers more than the meals. You see a snippet of unguarded character of each writer in how they pick up the challenge. There’s an intimacy in seeing someone at the stove, whether Molly Peacock retrieving his history with pancakes, or Phil Hall describing why this lemon loaf is meaningful to him. Dan MacDonald meditates on how food changes over a lifetime from taken for granted to being a sensory link to nostalgia. His grandmother’s “chow chow” is close to my aunt’s “Indian Relish”, with his Maritime recipe adding cabbage.

From Lorna Crozier’s gingersnaps to Peter Hrastovec’s Croation recipe for sataraš, a kind of side dish ratatouille there’s a wide range of food ideas.

A perk of the publication is a behind-the-scenes knowledge that under Conspiracy Press’ guidance, it was made by English students in their graduating year at University of Windsor’s Editing & Publishing Practicum. They contribute to the editing, design, marketing, and production of a nationally distributed book.

Foodies and poetry fans, probably have an overlap among general hedonists. Combine the two and you have a memoir that’s cooking.

Invisible Books made an author cookbook, Dinner Party: A Community Cookbook (Invisible, 2018). There’s also the Canadian Literary Fare blog, or Susan Musgrave’s cookbook, A Taste of Haida Gwaii. Cookbooks (https://www.culinaryhistorians.ca/wordpress/canadian-cookbooks-online/) aren’t about the cooking so much as the connecting and dreaming.

If you enjoyed it, a second in the series is coming out this summer.

About the Author

André Narbonne is a scholar, writer, and the publisher of Conspiracy Press, based in Windsor, Ontario. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, won the FreeFall Literary Contest, the David Adams Richards Prize, and the Atlantic Writing Contest. A first collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight, was shortlisted for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His first novel, Lucien & Olivia, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

About the Illustrator

John Fraser is an animator and illustrator for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has animated for Sesame Street, The Nature of Things and The National. He co-illustrated Scary Poems for Rotten Kids which was published by Black Moss Press.

About the Reviewer

Pearl Pirie is in Hills’ Almanach des Collines, an anthology of Gatineau Hills spec fiction 2026, and in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2025 and a forthcoming issues of The Fiddlehead and Kingfisher. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review. Recently in chapbooks: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, 2025), We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), and edited for phafours press: Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025). www.pearlpirie.com

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Conspiracy Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 3 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 96 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 106957130X

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1069571304

As a young activist working out of the Environmental Youth Alliance house in Vancouver in the summer of 1991, I remember hearing a lot about Paul Watson, formerly of Greenpeace, whose vessel Sea Shepherd II was out there intercepting and at times ramming into the driftnet fishing boats that posed a threat to dolphins and other “non-target” ocean species. There was debate about his methods, but general agreement that this kind of personal dedication was, in itself, pretty cool. The name of David Garrick also rings a bell, but I’d be hard put to place it exactly. During that period, Garrick would have been working in Ottawa, and I wouldn’t have met him, even though he’d been a huge presence in the British Columbia environmental movement before and after. It seems he was always a little bit behind the scenes, though, and many people hadn’t heard of him, or had, but then forgot about him, until Catherine Marie Gilbert undertook to tell his story in her new book Walrus: The Remarkable Life of Eco-Warrior David Garrick.

Garrick, it turns out, was involved in many of the iconic “direct action” campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. He was out there in the ocean going after Russian whalers, and on the ice getting in the way of the seal hunt. He often took on the role of “chronicler,” keeping copious notes on events as they unfolded, and writing dispatches for The Georgia Straight under his byline of “Walrus Oakenbough.” Over his lifetime, he amassed hundreds of notebooks filled with his observations and musings. Before his death in 2023 at the age of 76, he’d granted Gilbert access to this collection of handwritten material, and the two of them had engaged in extended conversations about his life. Walrus thus lands somewhere between biography and “as told to” autobiography. The book tells Garrick’s story from Garrick’s perspective, presenting his version of events—which doesn’t always exactly line up with other sources.

Garrick, like many in the counterculture, started life from a position of relative advantage. His father worked as an infectious disease specialist with diplomatic postings under the auspices of the World Health Organization, and a portion of Garrick’s youth was spent living in Panama’s Canal Zone. The contrast between his family’s privileges and surrounding conditions sensitized his nascent social conscience. As an adult, he would turn his back on financial stability and focus his energies fully on “the movement.” Vancouver was something of an epicentre for environmental and peace activism in the 1970s, and Garrick soon found his way there. The counterculture scene was vibrant and welcoming to like-minded newcomers, offering a chance to experiment with communal living and collective action.

As I can also attest from my time in the environmental movement, activist organizations are prone to internal rifts stemming from personality conflicts and/or differences in philosophy. A lot of the energy of groups like Greenpeace in the 1970s and 80s was directed towards saving individual animals—whales, seals, dolphins, wolves—from hunters, fishers, and government “cull” programs. This put them at odds with Indigenous communities and other local residents defending their traditional harvesting and mode of living. Garrick’s stated interest in working more closely with Indigenous groups was often sidelined by other movement members, who felt that nothing should stand in the way of stopping the kill.

Gilbert offers a wealth of detail about the various campaigns with which Garrick was involved, filling in a rich history of activism in and around British Columbia. Because her text is so heavily inflected through David Garrick’s telling of these events, it’s difficult at times to know how much to trust the accuracy of the story, particularly at points where Garrick may have been in conflict with others or where his memory departs from existing texts authored by some of these other players.

One area where I’d have liked a more complete picture is in regard to Garrick’s children and their mother, Taeko Miwa. We’re told that Miwa was displeased with Garrick’s workaholism and failure to contribute equally to childcare. At some point, she took the children to Japan for “a visit” and stayed there for fifteen years. These facts are delivered, but then the text just moves along to the next phase of Garrick’s environmentalist work. The book’s acknowledgements section indicates that the grown children cooperated in its publication, and perhaps they didn’t want more of their story to be told, but it feels like there is a heck of lot that’s buried between the lines.

Garrick spent most of his elder years living on Hanson Island in the Queen Charlottes, in a semi-permanent camp with shelter, a garden, and a solar array. He continued to keep notebooks during this time, logging the day’s activities and recording mystical experiences, like one in which a red cedar began to emit light and revealed itself to him as a magical portal.

The picture of Garrick that emerges from the pages of Walrus is at once singular and archetypal. His individuality shines through, and one can see why Gilbert was so charmed in her conversations with this man. At the same time, not having known him myself, I feel that I’ve known plenty of people very much like him. He’s representative of a period when it felt like the counterculture really had a shot at overturning reality, remaking society, and ushering in a New Age of peace and wellbeing and the occasional mushroom-enhanced walk between dimensions. His story is worth preserving, not just because it maps a timeline of significant events, but for the man himself.

About the Author

Catherine Marie Gilbert is an award-winning Vancouver Island author, photographer, historian and lecturer with a passionate interest in life on the British Columbia coast. She has written two books of BC history: Yorke Island and the Uncertain War, Defending Canada's Western Coast during WWII (2012) and A Journey Back to Nature, a History of Strathcona Provincial Park (2021), which was a BC Bestseller and won the Lieutenant Governor's Finalist Award for Historical Writing. Catherine has a Master's degree in public history from the University of Victoria and has taught Canadian history at North Island College in the Comox Valley. She frequently lectures on British Columbia coastal history even taking her stories on the road and out to sea, escorting tour groups to Strathcona Park and Nootka Sound. Catherine works at the Alert Bay Library & Museum and keeps an office in Campbell River. www.catherinegilbert.ca

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ronsdale Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 27 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 284 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1553807413

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1553807414

here and there

upon scorched fields

wild violets

—Arii Shokyu-Ni (1714-1781)

For my friend Johanna Hickey, a longtime supporter of Vancouver’s arts scene, a particular highlight of the year is the Powell Street Festival. Held on the first weekend in August or, in West Coast speak, the B.C. Day long weekend, the festival celebrates Japanese-Canadian culture with lively, fun activities—while also commemorating World War II internees.

Says Hickey, “To me, the Powell Street, or Paueru Gai, Festival enhances the multicultural life of our city. Each year this historic Japanese neighbourhood, now part of the Downtown Eastside, is transformed into a little Japan. The festive atmosphere, the colourful booths, the delicious food, the beautiful traditional clothing, the music, the powerful performances of the Taiko drummers—and, always, the historical import—draw me back year after year.”

To mark the festival’s first half-century, editor Emiko Morita and seven other contributors have created Return to Paueru Gai: Fifty Years of Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival. In her introduction to this collection of vivid essays and photos, Morita says, “At the festival, people from diverse backgrounds come together to produce, participate in, and experience a unique blend of traditional Japanese practices and contemporary arts. This neighbourhood was a vibrant Japanese cultural and economic hub prior to the community’s forced relocation and dispossession during World War II. As a result, the annual event is a poignant, living expression of continuity, resilience, and cultural exchange.”

The resilience shines off the book’s pages, showing the energy and vitality of the festival, from its workshops and crafts, to dances and theatre, to the yummy range of food in trucks and booths. Or, as Matt Miwa puts it, “The festival is a happy chaos! Everyone is integrating on some level; there isn’t a hierarchy. It is more like ‘And now this happens, now we do this...’ It is such an important immersion, I am forever bound to community-building. Powell Street Festival has taught me this.”

For the 2011 festival, Miwa and Julie Tamiko Manning wrote the 2011 play Tashme Project, inspired by oral histories of those who survived internment and resettlement.

To give you some background, the Canadian government’s 1942 War Measures Act prompted the forcible removal of more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians from their West Coast homes. If that weren’t mind-numbing enough, the government then waited until 1949, four years after war’s end, to restore Japanese Canadians’ rights, including citizenship and the right to vote. It took another 39 years for the Japanese Canadians’ Redress Movement to garner a federal government apology and a $300 million compensation package.

The shadows of mistreatment stretch back even further. By 1901, almost 5,000 Japanese had come to British Columbia. Anti-Asian racism, embodied by a group called the Asiatic Exclusion League, fuelled mob attacks on the immigrants’ businesses, many of these in the Paueru Gai neighbourhood.

However, as the great Japanese poet Arii Shokyu-Ni observed, even in scorched fields violets can grow. Out of that sad history, the Powell Street Festival bloomed. As Morita relates, Michiko Sakata, initiator of the photographic exhibition A Dream of Riches: The Japanese Canadians, 1877-1977, proposed a Japanese-style street festival as part of a Japanese Canadian Centennial Project. The Japanese Community Volunteers Association, or Tonari Gumi, raised funds, leading to the first festival.

At the time no one thought of it as the first, notes Morita. But “the confluence of circumstances and the mix of people and energy that emerged helped propel the festival into future iterations.”

Now, back to my friend Johanna Hickey, who has just avidly read Return to Paueru Gai. Her comment: “See you there!”

About the Editor

Emiko Morita (she/her), a third-generation mixed-heritage Japanese Canadian arts administrator, was the executive director of Powell Street Festival from 2015 to 2024. Previously, she worked in the publishing industry as marketing director at Douglas & McIntyre, leading marketing campaigns for national bestsellers; as special sales manager at Raincoast Books; and as the BC rep for the Canadian Children’s Book Centre.

About the Reviewer

A Vancouver writer/editor, Melanie Jackson is the award-winning author of middle-grade/YA suspensers, including Orca Books’ Dinah Galloway Mystery Series, and several chillers set in amusement parks.

Book Details

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press, April 7, 2026

• Language: English

• Paperback: 208 pages

• ISBN: 978-1834050249

Heidi Von Palleske’s The Lost Queen is the second in a planned trilogy of novels centred on musically-gifted near-identical albino twins, Clara and Blanca. I haven’t yet read the preceding book, Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack (2021), so it took a few chapters into this sequel to get my bearings, but once I did, my, oh my. Von Palleske, who is also a recognized actor and prolific poet, won an HR Percy Award for the manuscript of her first novel, They Don’t Run Red Trains Anymore (2017).

Her latest work, an intricately wrought story that revolves around Clara’s calamitous disappearance, inclines me to think that more actors should try their hands at penning fiction. Von Palleske writes with an awareness of a demanding, literate audience that expects a good return on their time and reading efforts. The Lost Queen meets such expectations, and not just by offering entertainment (though let’s not gloss over the importance of being entertaining). This novel is comprised of lovely writing, the crafting of which requires refinement as regards language and depth. One might even say that it has flavour and substance. After all, there’s a reason the title and other aspects of the novel invoke the disappeared operatic singer Clara and The Iliad’s Helen of Troy, whose vanishing from Sparta sparks a tragic decade-long conflict (Helen’s ‘abduction’ is explored here along lines I haven’t encountered before). Von Palleske shares with readers her extensive knowledge and understanding of many things, including history, opera, literature, and myth, as well as the ways different types of artistic endeavour can interact to produce complex yet engrossing storytelling.

Some evidence is certainly called for when a reviewer asserts that a novel has merit. Here, then, is one of The Lost Queen’s most notable achievements: the tight-knit circle of friends introduced in Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack, with the exotic-looking and talented Clara and Blanca at the centre, captivate with their intelligent, witty, and distinctive voices. They are a diverse cast in terms of their personal histories, ages, peccadillos, and driving passions. Each follows a trajectory carved out by current events (in a post-9/11 world), personal histories, formative relationships, yearnings, and anxieties. Yet, as with some of the most effectively constructed fiction, Clara’s eight-year absence in the novel and its excruciating consequences — for her twin and artistic collaborator Blanca, husband Gareth, 13-year-old daughter Iris (an uncannily intuitive girl who may be clairvoyant), Gareth’s lifelong friend and Clara’s one-time lover Jack, as well as punk opera impresario and Clara’s partner Martina — succeeds in uniting them in shared trauma and collective need to put to rest the uncertainty that continues to gnaw at all of them.

Blanca is the most deeply affected; eight years after Clara’s presumed abduction from Cape Town’s International Airport, she’s barely managing as she suffers from extreme anxiety and listlessness. She cuts herself to dull the pain, indirectly hurting Martina, who watches helplessly as her beautiful lover self-lacerates despite all of Martina’s efforts to prevent it. Master ocularist, Gareth, whose other early romantic partner, Sabine, had stepped into the void resulting from Clara’s absence, is acutely aware that he must let go of any remaining hope of finding his missing wife and fully commit to Sabine. The latter has been a protective step-parent to Iris and a fulfilled mother to little Fritz, her son with Gareth. Meanwhile, journalist Jack (Gareth’s closest friend from childhood) has had a second tragedy profoundly alter his life: the passing from AIDS of his beloved Tristan. He spent long periods in South Africa, ostensibly to document the spread of AIDS, but primarily to search for Clara, and must now come to terms with the heart-wrenching reality of having forfeited precious remaining time with Tristan.

In The Lost Queen, even characters who are outside the core of the group of friends that formed around the twins are compellingly rendered and seamlessly integrated into the plot. In fact, Von Palleske showcases her dramaturgical know-how by making these somewhat ‘secondary’ roles in the novel the source of comic relief or, at any rate, a respite from the intense lives of the main characters. For example, Jack’s mother, Hilda, whose romance with her now-deceased second husband, Siegfried, featured in Two White Queens, is the embodiment of warmheartedness and consideration for others, even when it comes to John, the ailing ex-husband who abandoned her for younger woman Jean. Hilda’s quiet rural life in Canada in a large house with a garden, where she gathers plants for creating her own essential oils, offers high-strung Iris a much-needed get-away from her life in Berlin, where she’s surrounded by reminders of her absent mother.

Other seemingly peripheral characters include Hungarian Holocaust survivor sisters, Bözsi and Esther Perlman, who found each other four decades after WWII. During the Holocaust, Bözsi had escaped to Spain, then to Algeria, where she ran a brothel, sang and danced the cancan, and later, privately entertained “officers from either side,” taking their money and afterward “pass[ing] their whispered secrets on” to the French Resistance. Esther, by contrast, saved herself by leaving for Canada where she married and led a conventional life as a wife and music teacher until her husband passed away. Esther happened to be the twin prodigies’ first musical mentor, which led to their debut in Toronto’s Massey Hall. It’s her longing to reconnect with her protégés after more than a decade that spurs these elderly sisters to leave their tenement rental in the Bronx (in New York City) for Berlin. Later, the sisters accompany Blanca, Martina, and Jack on a trip to Paris. They aim to track down Clara, convinced that the mysterious appearance of a vocal score to an original opera about Helen of Troy by an unnamed composer is a sign that she might be alive and wishing to be found.

Sections describing the sisters’ travels contain some of the wittiest passages in the novel. I include a sample below, where Bözsi and Esther argue about Charles de Gaulle’s legacy — specifically, the part he played in Quebec’s FLQ crisis by yelling “Vive le Québec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall during Montreal’s Expo ’67. The sisters’ conversation, reproduced here, is a testament to Von Palleske’s talent for devising colourful and engaging personalities:

On November 9, 1970, long after Esther and her husband had returned to Ontario [from Montreal], the news came out that de Gaulle had died. Esther bought a moderately priced bottle of Spanish sparkling wine. With a pop of a cork, she celebrated de Gaulle’s death. Her only regret was that he had died of natural causes and not been hanged, publicly, in Canada, for treason.

“Innocent people were tortured and killed in Quebec because of de Gaulle. He has the blood of Pierre Laporte on his hands.”

“Who?”

“Pierre Laporte! There is a bridge named after him in Montreal.”

“A bridge. Le pont! Hah!” Bözsi roared with laughter. “A bridge, really? Not exactly like having an airport named after you! And not just any airport. The busiest airport in Europe.”

“He lost his life. He was killed needlessly. Garroted.”

Bözsi shrugged. “What is one life, compared to a cause, a movement?”

“Then let’s not hear you whine about Henri being tortured! After all, it was only one life compared to a cause. A movement!”

“Not the same at all! I loved Henri.” Bözsi was hurt. Henri was a man she had known, had loved beyond reason. How could she compare some stranger, some man with a bridge name after him, to her greatest love?

“And Pierre Laporte had a wife and family who loved him, too!”

Because of this difference in opinion regarding de Gaulle, Bözsi referred to the airport as Aéroport de Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle, and Esther called it by its other name, Roissy Airport (148-149).

At the end of the novel, the above-mentioned opera is staged, and is a tour de force of contemporary ekphrastic writing. A section renders the full opera and its vocal performances. Note in the excerpt that follows, Von Palleske’s attention to sound, timing, and exquisitely conveyed stage direction in what the reader experiences as an unfolding spectacle about the aftermath of the sacking and burning of Troy:

Act three. There was now a huge wooden horse on stage. The Greeks ran out of it and set Troy on fire. The stage was aflame from red backlights behind the scrim and moved with the rustling of red silks.

Where was Helen and why wasn’t she in the arms of Menelaus? There, where she could get away, she didn’t. She chose not to. In a moment’s madness, she broke free of the Greeks and ran straight into the flames of Troy. It seemed that the fire consumed her. The stage lights flickered in orange and red. The smoke machine coughed up a wall of smoke. The stage silks wrapped around Blanca…..

….

Then there it was, seemingly out of nowhere. A sound like a wailing siren, breaking through the chaos. A reverberation that cut through everything. The orchestra was absolutely silent, and the note continued in purity and fierce defiance. It was music and scream combined! It pierced through the fire, cut through the dark. And there she was, dressed like a spring bride whose clothes had lost their sweetness in the flame. …Helen emerged from the fire itself. A goddess, immortal and alive. She had survived war. She had survived fire. She had survived love. (321)

The Lost Queen has a mystery at its centre, which the reader is eager to see solved. The mystery of Clara’s whereabouts therefore succeeds in propelling the narrative forward. Yet the novel proves itself worthy in other ways, not least for thematizing important social issues — for instance, the persistent danger of AIDS, the scourge of drug addiction, and the ruinous consequences of self-harming behaviours. Crucially, despite such serious subject matter, the novel preserves its general wholesomeness. This is because Von Palleske tells her characters’ individual stories with compassion and understanding, and because her characters are bonded by love.

*

What follows now is a kind of postscript to my review of The Lost Queen, which I hope readers will take a moment to read. In 2015, I purchased an anthology in anticipation of starting a PhD thesis on literary prizes. Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain (2006) turned out to be one of the best then-available books on the subject. Among its eleven essays — all incisive and necessary for scholarship on contemporary fiction and criteria related to its valuation — is Ioana Vagner’s “And the Winner Is … Rose Tremain.” Vagner peruses the specific qualities of novels that do and, conversely, don’t gain recognition from Booker Prize juries, offering superb analyses of Tremain’s brilliant and intricately plotted ‘historical’ novels, Restoration and Music & Silence. Much of the discussion, though a boon for the literary scholar, exceeds the scope and aims of this review. Yet, the distinction Vagner maps out between ‘sun-lit’ and ‘grim-lit’ fiction is germane because it forces us to read and assess novels like The Lost Queen on their own terms. Here is a snippet from Vagner’s essay:

In an article in Mslexia, the author and journalist Amanda Craig makes the distinction between what she calls ‘sun-lit’, books that are both literary and pleasurable, lifting the spirits while engaging the mind, and its opposite, ‘grim-lit’, “the sort of novel that, if suprebly written, offers an awful sort of consolation, the feeling that Life is even worse than you suspected.” She claims that authors like Fay Weldon, Joanna Trollope and Joanne Harris, although they are read and loved by millions, fail to pick up prizes because it seems they are too upbeat for critics. (79)

For Vagner, Craig deserves a hearing also regarding the related and equally fraught distinction, she claims is too often made, between ‘commercial’ and literary books. However, the crux of Vagner’s overall argument is this: first, such distinctions tend to rest on the assumption that great storytelling (or a great plot) precludes the possibility of stylistic muscle in novels, a view belied by 19th century literary giants like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, among others, and more recently, by Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, A.S. Byatt, and so many more. Vagner’s second and related assertion is that Tremaine should’ve been awarded a Booker Prize — that is, in addition to the many less prestigious literary awards she garnered. Vagner explains: “The recurrent themes in her work are: dispossession, the effect of religious and exlusive ‘clubs’ of all kinds…, compassion, class antagonisms, solitariness, sexual deprivation, emotional bravery, and, above all, love” (85).

I bring Vagner’s essay to readers’ attention here simply to underscore the difficulty involved and, unavoidably, the inexactness of any attempt to categorize The Lost Queen, especially given still-current critical frameworks. For me, this is ‘sun-lit’ fiction and truly fine writing. Von Palleske deserves a large readership, and an award or two.

About the Author

Heidi von Palleske is a film actor and the author of Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack, a novel that explores themes of identity and history. Known for populating her stories with outcasts and misfits, Heidi’s work spans film, TV, and literature, often challenging societal norms. She lives in Toronto.

About the Reviewer

Olga Stein is an academic, writer, editor, and university and college instructor. She was born in Moscow, the capital city of the former Soviet Union. She immigrated to Canada with her parents as a child, and has lived in Toronto her entire adult life. Stein earned her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. She studied philosophy, political science, literature, and languages. After serving for two decades in medical and literary publishing, including as chief editor of the literary book review magazine, Books in Canada, she returned to academe, and completed a PhD in contemporary Canadian literature and cultural institutions.

Stein has been writing literary essays and cultural commentary for nearly two decades. Since completing her PhD, she has also been writing short fiction and poetry. She has three children. Love Songs: Prayers to gods, not men is her debut collection of poems.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dundurn Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Feb. 24 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 344 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1459756916

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1459756915

Works Cited

Görtschacher, Wolfgang, and Holger Klein, editors. Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain. Praesens, 2006.

Vagner, Ioana. “And the Winner Is…” Fiction and Literary Prizes in Great Britain. Edited by Görtschacher, Wolfgang, and Holger Klein, Praesens, 2006, pp. 59-87.

Craig, Amanda. “Bring Me Sunshine.” Mslexia, no. 17, Apr. 2003, pp. 17-19.

In 1887, at the age of twenty four, a fisherman from Twillingate, Newfoundland, decided that there was no living or future to be had fishing cod, so he signed on as an ocean-going seaman and began to travel around the world. Either because he was lonely or simply because he thought that what he was seeing was worth recording, he began to keep a diary of his international travels. He kept this account of his life, written in an old hard-covered ledger, for eleven years, and then put it away until his death when it was inherited first by one of his sons, then one of his grandsons, and eventually it came to the attention of his great-nephew, Edward Noftle. Noftle brought it to publisher Ivor Jesperson. Almost a century after the author began writing it, and with the help and encouragement of Dr. George Story, Jesperson published the work as On the High Seas: The Diary of Capt. John W. Froude, Twillingate --1863-1939.

I was aware of Capt. Froude's book years ago, in part because I found it referred to often in George Story's Dictionary of Newfoundland English, but it was a book I had put off reading in full, because when I first attempted it, I found it too frustrating. I simply hadn't the patience it required. I knew that Rex Murphy had called it "Newfoundland's Ulysses," but even that wasn't enough to tempt me back when I had children to raise and a living to make. However, I was very glad to find the time for it more than fifty years later.

As described in the Publisher's Note, the text is "an exact transcription of the original diary; it follows the variable spelling, punctuation and capitalization of the original," and "the liniation is also that of the manuscript." In other words, Froude could not spell even his own name consistently, he had little or no use for punctuation, and capital letters were often reserved for the beginnings of each line rather than each sentence, rather than for the names of people, cities or countries.

Second time around, I loved this text almost immediately. The weird spelling, the lack of punctuation, the rapidity of the pace, all of which discouraged me all those years ago, were what I loved about it second time around. Froude's habit of bursting into rhyme with no warning made me laugh, and I particularly liked his combination free verse and rhyme to tell his stories.

It was often a bit of a game for me to try and identify whether what he was writing was original to him or lifted from elsewhere, and despite the spelling I quickly realized that in many places he was quoting from memory. For example, I knew that "From Greenland's icy mountains" was a well-known hymn, and I recognized the line about "men who go down to the sea in ships" which describes sailors seeing the works of the Lord in the deep, including tempestuous winds, high waves and divine deliverance. How could a man like Froude not know that psalm?

I also recognized the 19th century sea song "The Storm," also identified as "The Tradesman's Farewell." "Hark the boatswain harshly bawling--by top sail sheets and halyards stand, / Down top-gallants quick be hauling/ Down our staysails, stand boys stand." There are a few small changes in Froude's version, but they are inconsequential and they fit the scansion and rhyme. Froude is obviously uneducated but he's still pretty good. "Do they miss me at home," probably rings a bell with most of us. The poem was first published in 1844 by the author, Caroline Atherton Mason, but only became well known in 1852 when it was set to music and published by the composer, but without any attribution to Mason. It became popular as a song, and was taken up by soldiers engaged in the American Civil War. The irony is that when I went looking for the lyrics, I found that it had originally been written from the point of view of a homesick girl away at school. I attended residential school and then boarding school for a brief time as a young teen, and I can readily relate to the sentiment, just as Froude did. Many of the phrases I was familiar with were simply common aphorisms adopted by Froude, as we might do ourselves.

I did search for a number of other rhymes that had a familiar ring, including "He learned too late when the sun slipped down / How near he was to the golden crown," which is from a 1920s Edgar Guest poem "Don't Quit," urging persistence when facing hardships; "That's the time to remember the poor," from "The Snow is on the Ground" from 1891; "The Victor is he who can go it alone," from the 19th century poem "The Game of Life " by John Godfrey Saxe; "That's the Time to Remember the Poor," was an anonymous folk song, dating back to 1891; and "In sailing along the river of life, over its waters wide, / We all have to battle with trouble and strife and wait for the turn of the tide," from Harry Clapton, 1867.

No doubt there are many other borrowings tucked away in this journal, but I'm not suggesting Froude intended them to be mistaken for his own compositions. They were probably as familiar to his contemporaries as Beatles lyrics are to those of us who grew up in the 1960s.

One rather puzzling aspect of the book for me was the almost complete absence of any reference to Forude's immediate family. Froude mentions at one point that he got married but doesn't say any more than that, not even his wife's name. He eventually refers to his grown son, one of his twelve children, and even then his wife doesn't appear until a few pages from the end, and is still simply an anonymous woman. Froude speaks so warmly of his shipboard friends, naming them and in some cases mourning them. He was clearly not a cold man, but I don't think I'd have wanted him for a husband.

Once Froude has more or less settled back in Newfoundland, his account becomes a bit more pedestrian, though still interesting. The number of boats he sank kept me alert. When he falls back on describing celestial navigation and the use of the compass, I tuned out somewhat, and one can only think he was running short of sea stories. Towards the end of the book, Froude retells many of his adventures and particularly his near misses with death, and my attention began to lag. His poetic impulses come to the fore so he often reverts to rhyme, possibly borrowing phrases from other works, but I think I enjoyed his rougher, free-verse versions more.

Was Froude a good poet? No, but he was a good rhymester in the Newfoundland oral tradition. Particularly in the first half of his journal, he refers to the sea as the briny deep, the broad Atlantic wave, the raging foam, the bounding bellows, rippling waves, blue waters, the bosom of the mighty deep, the proud swelling sea, and (my favourite) like a wild beast roaming over the Patagonian plains. We get much less of this in the later parts of the work. Perhaps he simply realized he didn't have to stretch things quite so much to get our attention.

It has been suggested by some readers that Froude had little education, but he was at school until he was fourteen years old, which in 1877 was pretty advanced for an outport fisherman. More likely, if he were at school today, he would be identified as learning disabled, probably with dysgraphia, a form of dyslexia that affects a person's ability to write thoughts, not his reading capability. Known as Agatha Christie's Learning Disability, for her ability to compose and dictate so many best-selling novels, students today are often provided with a computer, which for some reason bypassed the hand's inability to write accurately. Such a diagnosis now puts dysgraphic authors such as Christie and editor Robert Fulford on an even playing field with otherwise clever and compelling writers.

Finally, I'd just like to add that I think Froude wanted an audience. He was clearly a compelling storyteller, and he kept the diary over a very long period when a great many of his possessions went down with his ships. I'm glad the diary was saved, that his great-nephew salvaged it, and that George Story immediately recognized its value. I'm just sorry I wasn't quite so open to its charms back when I was younger.

About the Reviewer

Robin McGrath was born in Newfoundland. She earned a doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, taught at the University of Alberta, and for 25 years did research in the Canadian Arctic on Inuit Literature and culture before returning home to Newfoundland and Labrador. She now lives in Harbour Main and is a full-time writer. Robin has published 26 books and over 700 articles, reviews, introductions, prefaces, teaching aids, essays, conference proceedings and chapbooks. Her most recent book is Labrador, A Reader's Guide. (2023). She is a columnist for the Northeast Avalon Times and does freelance editing.

Book Details

• Publisher: Jesperson Press (Out of print)

• Publication date: ‎ 1983

• Language: ‎English

• Print length: ‎260 pages

• ISBN: 0-920502-17-2

In this issue:

• Nowhere: A Graphic Novel by Jon Claytor (Fiction, Graphic Novel)

• The Forgotten Midwife by Laura Anthony (Fiction)

• The Fort George Murders of 1823: Crisis and Coexistence in New Caledonia by Geoff Mynett (Non-Fiction)

• Numb: The Politics of Overwhelm by Mark Abley (Non-Fiction)

• John’s Table: Poems by Lesle Lewis (Poetry)

• James’ Review Roundup

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Poetry

What’s the Point? By Steven Laffoley

Point Pleasant Park is a popular, well-known and well-used park in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and if you ever wanted to know all there is to know about it, look no further. As in his other “irreverent guides,” Laffoley feeds us a lot of interesting information with side notes and a good sense of humour along the way.

In What’s the Point?, Laffoley explains the origins of Point Pleasant Park, talks about the many monuments and historical sites around the park, discusses the dizzying array of flora and fauna (including the happy, frolicking, off-leash dogs), the tragedies that occurred, and how the park has been used and what it has meant to different groups of people over the years. You’ll learn things you’ve always wanted to know as well as things you never knew you wanted to know. You’ll wonder when the next trivia night at the pub is (and think about lending the owners a copy of your book).
—Contributed by Naomi MacKinnon

Subscribe to Canada's oldest continuously published literary magazine and help sustain us into the future! A subscription to The Fiddlehead brings you issues packed with new work from the best of emerging and established writers in Canada and the world.

Shadowy zombies, red eyes gleaming hungrily. Shadowy wolves, leaving red footprints in their wake. A mysterious giant cube that recalls the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith, with its hopeful suggestion of friendly aliens—but scratch any idea of friendly. The cube has pools of blood seeping from underneath.

Welcome to Beauséjour, the setting of Jon Claytor’s noir-ish graphic young-adult novel Nowhere. The zombies, wolves, and cube are just some of the ominous sights greeting protagonist Joel and his family when they move into town.

Enjoyably scary as a horror story, Nowhere also serves as Claytor’s clever metaphor for adolescence. After all, when you’re a teen, unsure and unconfident, reality can be as frightening as the aforementioned wolves et al.

Joel certainly finds that, to put it mildly, “sometimes the wildlife was a little close to home.” And, “There did seem to be more creepy-crawlies than ever before.”

To my delight, Claytor also lets some humour creepy-crawl in. For one, the irony of the town’s name: Beauséjour means “pleasant place.”

For another, the wisecracks, e.g., when an unhappy character named Calvin seeks a therapist’s help for his vampire-like tendencies. Through sprouting fangs, Calvin confides that he, his family, and friends are all monsters. “What about your brother?” the therapist asks gently. “He’s not a monster.”

Calvin’s response: “WORSE! He works in HUMAN RESOURCES!” For this reader, a survivor of hit-and-miss HR office policies and procedures, that moment is pure LOL.

Here’s another chuckler. Joel’s mom, Molly, gets a call from a friend, whose advice re Beauséjour’s wandering zombies is “best turn off your lights and close your curtains.” However, here’s what the friend is far more interested in: “The big news is Sue and Dave hooked up. I mean, ew!”

Claytor deftly adds poignancy into the horror-humour mix. Wise Molly counsels her jittery son, “Vampires can’t come in unless you invite them.” Good advice for all readers, all ages.

Even more effective at keeping vamps at bay? The life-changing realization that dawns on budding artist Joel: “The best way to avoid monsters of all sorts is to stay home and draw.”

Creativity. Imagination. Both far more powerful weapons for adolescents, for anyone, than trying to counter bullies with threats. Bothered by vampires? Forget ’em. Put down that stake. Instead, pick up a sketchbook and pencil.

Shortlisted, Amazon Canada First Novel Award

About the Author

About the Author and Illustrator

Jon Claytor is a graphic novelist, painter, and writer living in Sackville, New Brunswick. Jon’s work ranges from oil painting and watercolour to comics. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries in Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, and throughout the Maritimes. As well as writing and illustrating stories for CBC Radio, the Frye Festival, and ruralharmreduction.com, Jon was nominated for a Juno Award for the cover of Gord Downie’s Battle of the Nudes in 2004. His graphic memoir, Take the Long Way Home, was published by Conundrum in 2022. Nowhere is his first graphic novel.

About the Reviewer

Melanie Jackson is a Vancouver writer/editor. She’s also the award-winning author of middle-grade/YA suspensers, including Orca Books’ Dinah Galloway Mystery Series, and several chillers set in amusement parks. Visit Melanie at The Writers’ Union of Canada.

Book Details

• Publisher: Goose Lane, March 17, 2026

• Language: English

• Paperback: 448 pages

• ISBN: 9781773104584

Laura Anthony’s harrowing and heartrending novel, The Forgotten Midwife tackles the shameful history of the Magdalene laundries, facilities that operated in Ireland under the auspices of the Catholic Church for over a century.

The story is narrated in two threads. In the contemporary timeline, set in New Jersey, Riley Carmichael is betrothed to Sam. Riley, keen to join Sam’s large, bustling family, regrets that her own family consists of just her and her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s and resides in a care home. One day, in a rare moment of lucidity, Riley’s grandmother gives her a shoebox containing old documents that Riley didn’t know of, documents that link Riley’s mother, who was adopted and is now deceased, to Irish roots. This new knowledge propels Riley and Sam to Ireland searching for Riley’s Irish family.

The historical timeline, beginning in 1956, centres on Margaret Lannigan of Tipperary. 20-year-old Margaret, a fun-loving, carefree spirit, dreams of the day she will marry her fiancé, Joseph Maloney. But it is not to be. When Margaret’s older sister, Sheila, dies suddenly, Margaret finds herself the focus of unwanted attention. It has been tradition in the Lannigan family for the eldest daughter to take vows and join a local order of nuns called the Sisters of Penance. With Sheila’s death, this obligation falls to Margaret, who, much to her chagrin, is given no choice in the matter.

Despite her protests, and without delay, Margaret is whisked off to Ballyvale Convent by the domineering Father Michaels. Life at the convent is a quiet one of discipline and solitude. Margaret misses her family and Joseph, but over several years slowly adapts to the new life that has been forced upon her. However, she is unable to quell her rebellious nature, questioning everything and always looking for ways to circumvent the rules. She is especially curious about the well-dressed couples that arrive at the convent from time to time and, after meeting with Father Michaels, leave with big smiles and a newborn baby.

The building across the road is also a subject of fascination for Margaret. It appears to her untutored eye as a second convent, though she’s been told it’s a laundry. Then, after an act of insubordination results in her being pegged as an unrepentant troublemaker by the mother superior and Father Michaels, she is transferred from the convent proper to the laundry, where she is forced without training into the role of midwife to the “fallen” girls who have been sent there by their families to await the birth of their babies behind closed doors.

This is where Margaret’s story, and Anthony’s novel, takes off. Ever the rebel, horrified by the misery she witnesses, Margaret does everything she can to alleviate the suffering of the girls, who labour ceaselessly in sweatshop conditions under the watchful eye of the unfeeling Matron whose cruelty seems to know no bounds, but whose behaviour is excused and encouraged by Father Michaels. At great risk to herself, Margaret disregards the rules yet again and connives with others at the laundry to ease the burden on the girls and save them where possible.

Margaret’s haunting tale of strength and defiance against enormous odds elicits a visceral response and, midway through, makes the book something of a page-turner. By contrast, the half-dozen or so chapters devoted to Riley’s search for her roots are less compelling, included (one suspects) only to serve as a structural bridge into Margaret’s story.

But this is a minor caveat. The Forgotten Midwife provides a vividly dramatic account of righteous and principled resistance to corrupt authority, and in Margaret Lannigan, the author has created a strikingly full-blooded, engagingly imperfect protagonist. Also, and to her credit, Laura Anthony does not shy away from the horrific details that make the Magdalene laundries one of the more shameful and sordid episodes in the checkered history of the Catholic Church.

About the Author

Laura Anthony is a pseudonym for a published author of emotional women's fiction. She lives in Kildare, Ireland, with her husband and children.

About the Reviewer

Ian Colford has published three novels and two collections of stories. Evidence was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. The Crimes of Hector Tomás followed in 2012. Published by Freehand Books of Calgary, it won Trade Book of the Year at the 2013 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. Perfect World was published by Freehand in 2016 and shortlisted in the book design category at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. In 2019, A Dark House was published by Nimbus Publishing of Halifax and was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize in Short Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards and the Relit Award. In 2022 The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard won the Guernica Prize and was published by Guernica Editions in November 2023. Witness, a sequel to Evidence, will be published in 2026 by Galleon Books of Moncton, NB. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. More info can be found at www.iancolford.com.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 12 2026

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 368 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1668241935

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668241936

Personally, I find anything surrounding the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company to be fascinating, and The Fort George Murders of 1823: Crisis and Coexistence in New Caledonia doesn’t disappointment. For me, it fits the slot of a now little known part of, at least to me, a 350-year-old story.

In 1823, two HBC employees were murdered at Fort George, near what was then known as New Caledonia in British Columbia. The murders were an event that would fracture already fragile relations between HBC and its Indigenous (Dakelh) neighbours. Expertly researched, author Geoff Mynett peels back the layers of history and digs through archival material to not only examine what lead to and what happened after the murders, but to cast a light on archival history.

Mynett repeatably mentions the story is mostly known from official HBC files and very little else. Mynett did use Indigenous sources as well, where available, specifically oral histories and available writings. This is an important part of the story overall. It shows that often what we know of history is one-sided or skewed because of how archival material was or is kept or what was or is deemed significant. At its core, The Fort George Murders of 1923 is a critical piece of history that should be widely known, but potential readers should always keep in mind, this is a history text. For the casual reader, it will feel a bit dry, so I do appreciate the timeline, use of large chunks of primary material (rather than paraphrasing someone’s thoughts) to help show personal insight, and a recap of what happened to certain key players.

If you enjoy Canadian history, true crime, or perhaps just want to find out more about the now defunct HBC during its non-department store years, I recommend The Fort George Murders of 1823.

About the Author

Geoff Mynett was born in Shropshire, England and qualified in England as a barrister. After coming to British Columbia in 1973, he requalified and practised law in Vancouver until his retirement.His first book, Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician (Ronsdale Press, 2019), received a Jeanne Clarke Memorial Award. His recent books, Pinkerton's and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot, Murders on the Skeena, River of Mists, The Eventful Life of Philip Hankin, and A Gentleman of Considerable Talent were published by Caitlin Press; both Pinkerton's and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot and Murders on the Skeena appeared on the BC Bestseller List for eight consecutive weeks in 2021, respectively. A believer in the importance of knowing our histories, Geoff Mynett is also an amateur artist. He and his wife Alice live in Vancouver.

About the Reviewer

Katie Ingram is a freelance journalist and the author of Breaking Disaster: Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion and The Undesirables: A History of Rockhead Prison. She’s also a part-time instructor with the University of King’s College School of Journalism, Writing and Publishing.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Caitlin Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Jan. 27 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 210 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1773861794

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1773861791

Under the Traction imprint at Baraka Books — which publishes “small, accessible, affordable and relevant” titles that “address current and contemporary issues and are written by authorities on the subject”— the latest from Mark Abley explores feelings (or lack thereof?) that are not unfamiliar in the age of 24-hour news cycles and social media feeds fuelled on engagement at all costs.

Contrary to its title, Numb begins with deeply affecting imagery of an animal in a zoo enclosure. The last of its kind, a female quagga spends its life in isolation and loneliness, blankly staring at the patrons in (one imagines) despair. One could imagine that this is merely a heartbreaking analogy until the reader quickly sees through the text that we are the quagga, too: Existing, but not really living — not hearing the tall tundra grasses sway in the breeze, smelling the perfume of red dust, running with abandon. We are not free but rather have one foot in the quicksand of learned helplessness, unable to muster much of a response anymore to what feels like unavoidable, unending shocks.

From here, the author lays out the case for the reader that numbness perverts a natural psychological response into a political strategy. Sure, in the short term, allowing oneself to feel numb is adaptive coping; sometimes, a situation requires time to digest. Relying on a wealth of personal experience and global events, Abley notes when and how numbness morphs, from a method of protection, to the avoidance of unprocessed trauma. If one is fortunate, something — a small gesture from a stranger, perhaps — breaks through the shell and allows healing to begin (“I was, at last, getting over the numbness that had ambushed me…a numbness that had lasted through the ensuing weeks and months even while I wrote articles designed to make other people feel.”), but the prospect of and progression to institutionalized hopelessness looms near.

And, Abley argues, that is by design. The politics of “numbness” thrives on the trauma it induces and in the spaces where we feel like the news and rhetoric are unavoidable. (Which news and rhetoric induces this state, he notes, depends on one’s political position) The politicians in question are largely faceless, but numerous examples are handily drawn from our neighbours to the south “‘… What we want to do is to create in the minds…this Shock and Awe, so they are intimidated, …that they have no choice but to do what we want them to do.’” In reading this and other examples in the book, it’s difficult not to consider how an errant government (and by extension, the media that is helpless but to report on them) holds its own population in the same regard as the “enemy”.

A credit to the author, he manages to keep the reader engaged — without being relentless or “almost pornographic” in sharing numbing historical examples to make his point (e.g., pandemics, colonization, genocide, war), and without inducing the very state of withdrawal he is documenting. To that last point, I mused that the format — bite-size, conversational chapters, rather than a deeper academic treatise on the psychology and sociology of numbness — may have been by design to permeate our attention in an age of overwhelm and distraction.

While the book ends with this call to rise to the challenge of resistance, Numb is primarily a quick read documentary that makes the case for taking action and lets you know that you are not alone in your feelings — or lack thereof. Resistance is not futile.

About the Author

Mark Abley is a nonfiction writer, journalist, editor and poet. His most recent books are Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail and an updated edition of the ground-breaking Conversations with a Dead Man: Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. One of his earlier books, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal; it has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese and Latvian. A long-time Montrealer, Abley now lives in Gananoque, Ontario.

About the Reviewer

Bryn Robinson (she/her) lives in New Brunswick, Canada, where she uses her PhD in experimental psychology to support mental health programming in the province. She prefers contemporary fiction, narrative non-fiction, graphic novels and poetry that is emotional, reflective, and if it can do it with humour, all the better. Bryn also writes on Campfire Notebook, where she regularly features her original poetry, photography, and other art. When not reading, she’s searching for birds in the New Brunswick forests and seascapes, camera in hand.

Book Details

• Publisher : Baraka Books (June 1, 2026)

• Contact & Ordering Information:

• Language : English

• Paperback : 90 pages

• ISBN : 9781771864305