The Seaboard Review: May 12th, 2025
Volume 2, Issue 19
I am writing this while on vacation in Nova Scotia; the Minas Basin area to be exact. Yes, the tide is going out in this photo. Also, very windy, and the effects of Hurricane Fiona are still very much in evidence, particularly all the fallen trees everywhere.
We have four reviews this issue for your reading pleasure, plus two “Hot Takes”. Also, Spring is a busy time for book launches, so check out the “Book News” area to see what’s happening in your area, and if you know of any upcoming book events, please contact us at the email below.
Enjoy the nice weather, wherever you are!
Review of the Week
May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers by Minelle Mahtani
When Minelle Mahtani’s mother, Farideh, is diagnosed with an excruciating form of cancer that steals her speech, the author, having recently left an academic job in Toronto to join her partner in Vancouver, dives back into her childhood. Her choices, her relationship with her mother, and the many questions left unanswered and unasked. “I thought about a…
Other Reviews
Fiction
R.I.P. SCOOT by Sara Flemington
Everyone writing screenplays these days has a copy of the book Save The Cat. It preaches that the hero must do something when we first meet them, so that we like them. Right away, Flemington’s main character does indeed save the cat, but fleetingly.
Non-Fiction
Health Explored: A Journey in Happiness, Healing, and Humanity by Dr. Mike Wahl
Success, happiness, wellness; what do these words really mean, and how have their definitions changed over time? Looking around his corporate office one day, Dr. Wahl, feeling hollow and disconnected, wondered how he had strayed so far from the life he had imagined. All he wanted to do was help people heal, but he knew our fast-paced world was getting i…
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
Hot Takes: Brief Notes on Books Present & Past
(Note: clicking on the underlined link takes you to the book’s publisher page or Amazon.ca for more information or for purchasing purposes)
Blood Slaves by Markus Redmond
Markus Redmond’s concept — well deserved retribution rains down on racists/white slave owners when the enslaved protagonist Willy crosses paths with a new kind of vampire — is audacious and grabby. The debut novelist’s plot concept perhaps owes more to Quentin Tarrantino’s Django Unchained, Kill Bill, and Inglourious Basterds than it does Bram Stoker and his spawn. It sets up scum of the earth bad guys who deserved to be fully reaped for their evil by a dire reckoning force.
I frequently wondered while reading it if a better supernatural beast to tear the overseers apart might not be zombies which always conjure the idea of swarming, unstoppable, mute disease, or werewolves which channel rage atavistically into beasts. This suggests we as humans are never far from our animalistic roots. Or a shapeshifter like Carpenter’s Thing. I think we can all relate to the idea of longing for a huge, punishing force. Or being able to appeal to the avenging God of the Old Testament to right wrongs by taking eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. (Contributed by Emily Weedon)
Poems on the Long Finger by Robin McGrath
For those unfamiliar with Newfoundland’s idiom, “on the long finger,” Robin McGrath explains that it means to delay or procrastinate (and is therefore akin to the French “esprit d’escalier” and German “Treppenwitz”). Since Poems on the Long Finger appear late in the poet’s life, they are one form of deferment; another would be the delay in capturing her wit and resonance across the long landscape of her province with its rich language, lore, and years of lasting. Her lino prints add an extra visual layer to her poems: the book’s cover, “Abandoned Sweatlodge,” bends long fingers in a frame that houses an abandoned and procrastinated dwelling.
Long Whitmanesque lines in her final “envoi” poem, “Tonguebang,” resonate across rock, her repeated “Made in Canada” serving as a counterweight to American democratic vistas. The tongue-in-cheek title (scold heartily) checks Mary Dalton’s “Interrobang” and her own “Bangbelly,” which is a kind of pudding in Newfoundland. This song of herself begins with a stretched birthmark extending across the island: “I was born and bred, wrapped in a cool cloak of Grand Banks fog.” A long balance of alliteration carries through the rest of the sentence and stanza, which ends with “Upalong,” (the rest of Canada) “washing my genes clean, taking the salt out of my blood line.” Between loneliness and extended notions of identity, the long finger bleeds through generations, countries of dual identities and histories.
McGrath wags her chin and finger across land and language, salt earth and tongue. If Robert Bringhurst listens to and translates Salish on the west coast, McGrath does the same in her “Nutshimit” section with its empathetic anthropology. “Everyone Cries in the Sweatlodge” fills in her abandoned sweatlodge on the book’s cover with “But in the women’s sweat, there’s laughter also.” The dark talk is in “Innu-aimun,” the tamarack tea cathartic on the skin, and tobacco tossed on the fire with the left hand whose long finger reaches to mothers’ arms. In “Trapper Talk” she lingers on the word “narsel,” which is “soft and furred as the nose of a caribou.” Around the bay, salt in the air and saline solutions preserve McGrath’s long finger with its afterwit of boughwiffen and bangbelly. A poet of fluctuating temperatures, she bathes with Robert Kroetsch’s Snowbird Poems, her hot bath against breakwater and frozen ocean.
McGrath inhabits and peoples her lodge and island with salt, sweat, spruce flags, fog, finger, and tropes of translation. (Contributed by Michael Greenstein)
To obtain a copy:
Stone Cold Press,
304, Harbour Main, NL,|
A0A 2P0
OR:
Robin McGrath,
robinmcgrath@gmal.com
Price is $20, which includes the postage.
Book News
If you would like to have your book event shared in our Monday emails, please contact us at theseaboardreview@gmail.com!
For folks out Toronto way, once a month The Caledonian Pub at 856 College St is home to Drunk Fiction, an irreverent night of readings, where readers, listeners, authors and those who love them can gather, drink and nosh! May 27 is Dennis E Bolen touring his new book amaranthine chevrolet, along with Marianne Miller, Aviva Rubin and Sydney Hegele. Check in at https://emilyweedon.com/drunk-fiction for more info!
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Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief
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Thanks for the restack!
Welcome to Nova Scotia! I visited this province over years ago for a visit - and wound up staying for good!