The Seaboard Review: March 17th, 2025
Date Volume 2, Issue 11
Hello, TSR Subscriber!
It’s past the middle of March, and while spring hasn’t officially started, the snow is quickly disappearing here in Miramichi. It will soon be time to take off the snow tires and put on the summer ones, store away the snowblower (but keep shovels handy) and think about lawns and gardening, if that is your pleasure.
The management team (James, Heather, and Selena) are busy organizing giveaway events for our first anniversary month in April. It is also poetry month, and we’ll have a poetry bundle to give away to a lucky subscriber.
Speaking of subscribers, we now have 320 as I write this! That number includes our paying subscribers (thank you!) as well as our free ones. Being a paid subscriber (for as little as $5/month) allows us to give out honorariums to our team of contributors, which keeps them dedicated to writing reviews of books we think are worthy of your time. Click the button to see all the options.
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Another excellent issue awaits!
Opinion
Do Book Reviews Still Matter?
A GOOD BOOK REVIEW is a time-delayed conversation with writers. It allows them to see how a well-informed reader finds their writing technique, structure, style, suspense, and the overall effect of their work. Worse than a one-star review on Goodreads, a negative review can greatly affect an author’s psyche. Famously, John Bentley Mays’ dismissive revie…
Time and Tide by J.M. Frey
J.M. Frey’s Time and Tide is a playful and poignant exploration of time travel, historical fiction, and queer romance, anchored by sharp wit and an emotionally resonant core. In this novel, Sam Franklin—a bisexual woman from the twenty-first century—survives a plane crash only to find herself inexplicably transported to the deck of a British warship in …
The Castor’s Choice by Jeff Wilson
I began reading Jeff Wilson’s debut novel with high hopes. The timing couldn’t be better for a book with a professor of Canadian history as the protagonist, while the Orange Menace in the White House has launched a war of words and trade against our country, questioning our sovereignty and borders, and ranting about how we’d make the perfect 51st state…
Safekeeping Provides Helpful Advice for Book Planning and Launch
There are a number of resources out there that offer tips on how to write a book in a hurry. Unable to resist the promptings of curiosity, I read one volume whose premise was how to write a book in 24 hours. Like many things that sound too good to be true, the book, while containing some useful suggestions, didn’t live up to my expectations.
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
Water Music: Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari
In one form or another, so many Israeli novels feature an archaeological dig; that is, beneath the contemporary setting lies a biblical subtext that adds a layer of meaning to the modern situation. Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted borrows from Genesis as the novel opens with a convoluted time frame when Yaqub (Jacob) meets his beloved at a m…
Hot Takes: Brief Notes on Books Present & Past
(Note: clicking on the underlined link takes you to the book’s publisher page for more information or for purchasing purposes)
In Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (2024, Verso), Jo, a young Norwegian woman, has arrived in the English town of Aybourne to attend college and study biology. She has no place to live and initially stays in a hostel before securing a room in an apartment located in a converted brewery. Her roommate in the brewery apartment is Carral, who works as an office temp and has a degree in English Literature, but reads trashy romance novels. From the outset, Jo’s narration emphasizes her physical surroundings, the fleshly textures of the food she eats and the people around her: “The food in the breakfast hall was slippery and fluid.” And, “The foreign students too were smooth and gleaming.” This is a novel that spins an elusive flesh and blood tale of bodies stewing in their own juices. It’s as if we’re observing specimens under a microscope, cells clinging to one another, consuming each other. The world of Jenny Hval’s first novel is familiar but alien and hints at something unsavoury just below the surface, but well out of sight. Paradise Rot does not divulge its secrets. But it does leave an imprint on the reader that is not quick to fade. (Contributed by Ian Colford)
Betsy Warland's Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (2021, Inanna) is a meditation on grief that refuses the tidy resolution so often expected of memoir. This second edition, published by Inanna Publications, reaffirms Warland's reputation as a writer unafraid to push the boundaries of form, layering personal history with poetic fragmentation to mirror the uneven terrain of loss. Warland's mother, an enigmatic and often distant figure, becomes both presence and absence, haunting the text through memory and the gaps between what can and cannot be said. With the precision of a poet and the insight of a seasoned essayist, Warland transforms personal mourning into a deeply intellectual exploration of language, silence, and the ways in which we attempt to narrate the unutterable. Bloodroot is not merely a recounting of loss, but an excavation of its residual weight, reminding us that some absences shape us as profoundly as presences ever could. (Contributed by Selena Mercuri)
Saints Rest Book Launch
The SAINTS REST Book Launch “tour” continues with a stop in Fredericton at Gallery 78 (the oldest private art gallery in New Brunswick!) Saturday, March 29th at 6pm. I’m told that there will be copies of all three books of Luke’s there, and Westminster Books will be selling them.
Pets & Current Reads
Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief