The Seaboard Review of Books October 1, 2025
Volume 2, Issue 41 of The Seaboard Review of Books, October 1, 2025
Note: the next issue of The Seaboard Review of Books will appear in one week, on Wednesday, October 8th. There will be no Monday issue next week.
In this issue:
We Bury Nothing by Kate Blair
To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand
Behind the Bricks: The Life and Times of the Mohawk Institute, Canada’s Longest-Running Residential School
Birdology by Carolyne Van Der Meer
Best Canadian Essays 2025, Edited by Emily Urquhart
Fiction
We Bury Nothing by Kate Blair Ties Past to Present with Engaging Mystery
Kate Blair is an award-winning young adult/middle grade author. Her first four novels were science fiction or fantasy. With We Bury Nothing, she’s turned her attention to historical fiction, highlighting a lesser-known aspect of Canada’s involvement in WWII. Did you know that Canada operated prison camps for 34,000 combatant German prisoners of war (POW…
To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand
Madhur Anand’s bracingly original debut novel, To Place a Rabbit, chronicles several periods in the life of a middle-aged expert in the ecological sciences after she takes on a project to translate a novella into English. The scientist has written a volume of popular science and is touring to promote her book when, at a literary festival, she encounters…
Non-Fiction
Behind the Bricks edited by Richard W. Hill Sr, Alison Norman, Thomas Peace, and Jennifer Pettit
Behind the Bricks is a comprehensive study of the life and times of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, one which not only details student experiences but grounds them in the overall historical, social, archaeological, architectural, and religious context, with each analysis reflecting the specific milieu and outcomes during different time perio…
Poetry
Birdology by Carolyne Van Der Meer
A beautifully written chapbook from Cactus Press. Carolyne Van Der Meer is a seasoned poet, author, and journalist based in Montreal, Quebec. The cover of this chapbook features a sketch of a tree sparrow. One can only wonder if this is the same sparrow from the
Micheal Greenstein Reviews
Best Canadian Essays 2025, Edited by Emily Urquhart
Sometimes an essay strives to be poetry, sometimes a short story; such is the case with many of the selections in Emily Urquhart’s collection, Best Canadian Essays 2025. Accordingly, in her “Introduction” she quotes from Robert Penn Warren’s long poem “Audubon: A Vision”: “Tell me a story / In this century, and moment, of mania / Tell me a story.” These…
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. Support your local bookseller or independent publisher if you can.)
The Aurora Award-nominated The Fountain by Suzy Vadori.
Ava’s the new kid at an exclusive boarding school. Her family isn’t particularly well off, but both her parents are alumni, and Ava earned a scholarship. Courtney makes Ava’s life hell in the first days, telling Ava the wrong time for swim practice so she shows up late, changing the lock on her locker, so Ava has to dash across campus in her swimsuit, and planting performance-enhancing drugs in Ava’s locker so that they fall out when the school’s maintenance worker opens it for her. She’s only been at the school for two days, and already she’s under threat of expulsion. It’s no wonder that when she finds a fountain in the woods near the school, Ava tosses in a coin and makes a wish that the school never heard of Courtney or her family. The problem is that the fountain is magic, and Ava’s wish comes true. A bittersweet YA novel about the choices we make, and the wishes we can’t undo. (Contributed by Melanie Marttila)
TSR Team News
Melanie Marttila is pleased to announce that her poem “Vasilisa,” originally published by Graeme Cameron in Polar Borealis 30 is in the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume 3, publishing October 14, 2025.
She is deeply honoured to be among such stellar company.
And….
She will be on two panels at this year’s Can-Con (October 17 to 19, 2025 at the Brookstreet Hotel, Kanata, Ontario)!
The first will be “The Art of Rest” at 8 pm on Friday, October 17, and the second is “The Taste of Sadness: Writing Emotional Dysregulation” at 2:30 pm on Sunday, October 19.
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Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief