The Seaboard Review: April 21st, 2025
Volume 2, Issue 16
Giveaways Galore!
Our one-year anniversary and poetry month continue! The icehouse poetry giveaway and the ECW Press giveaway concluded over the weekend, but we still have two more giveaways, these ones exclusively for our Substack subscribers. The first giveaway is of a six-book bundle from Penguin Random House for our paid subscribers (all paid subscribers are automatically entered). These are six of their top-selling titles from 2024 and a paid subscriber will win them all!
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune
Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation by Murray Sinclair
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
If you are not a paid subscriber, then let this be the incentive you need to sign up! If that’s not enough, we’ve discounted annual subscriptions by 50% for April, our anniversary month.
The second giveaway is sponsored by Breakwater Books and it is for our many free Substack subscribers:
Hides by Rod Moody-Corbett
The Weather Diviner by Elizabeth Murphy
Called by Mother Earth by Greg Naterer
Both giveaway winners will be announced Wednesday April 30th/May 1st. The winning subscriber must have a Canadian mailing address.
TSR’s Social Media Links
Poetry Month Reviews:
It's Been a Fine Year by Spencer Folkins
When it comes to reviewing poetry, I make no pretense as to appear to know what I’m talking about. I am not a Michael Greenstein (or any of the fine poetry reviewers here at TSR) and I never will be, but I appreciate poetry like I appreciate art and music, if it moves me in some way, I like it. There is so much good poetry out there (however one defines…
Re: Wild Her by Shannon Webb-Campbell
In Re: Wild Her, Shannon Webb-Campbell writes as though grief has etched itself into the firmament. Her latest collection is an intimate, itinerant work of lyric poetry that blends the celestial with the sorrowful, the bodily with the political, and the personal with the planetary. With a poet’s ear and a revolutionary’s sense of inheritance, Webb-Campb…
Other Reviews
Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Grace Feuerverger
The setting for Grace Feurverger’s Winter Light: The Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors is the beautifully described working-class Montreal of her childhood, but the ever-present backdrop is the Treblinka extermination camp, to which the author’s parents, their families and the entire Jewish population of Częstochowa, Poland, were deported in 1942…
One In Six Million by Amy Fish
Most of us don’t remember what it was like before we had the world at our fingertips, millions of historical records in searchable databases, the ability to find people and create our family trees from our desktop in a very short time. Many of us have had our DNA tested, by a kit that came in the mail, with a report emailed to us a few weeks later. How …
I Remember Lights by Ben Ladouceur
I Remember Lights, poet Ben Ladouceur’s alternately poignant and blistering debut novel, is the engaging story of one young man navigating his way through a world hostile to gay culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The story is told in two threads, set ten years apart.
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
Interrobang by Mary Dalton
Half question mark, half exclamation, hybrid interrobang is a portmanteau of punctuation. (Its double effect would be even more pronounced in Spanish where these marks precede and follow questions and exclamations like pairs of dangling earrings.) In Mary Dalton’s poetic grammar, interrobang is a “prince” of punctuation, merrybegot in the coupling of qu…
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)
“and then he was GONE”
This is a 2016 novel by NB author Joan Hall Hovey, about a missing husband who the police are beginning to suspect was murdered, a wife determined to find him despite being the prime suspect, a young man who wakes from his 19 year coma and a psychic aunt who sees the truth. A thriller with a sprinkling of the supernatural, Hovey has penned a deliciously written, nail-biting, and thoroughly satisfying mystery. I rated it 5 stars and immediately picked up a few more from this talented and engaging writer. (Contributed by Heather McBriarty)
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
It will be no surprise to those familiar with John Scalzi’s writing that premise of his most recent book is a bit out there. When the Moon Hits Your Eye follows on the heels of The Kaiju Preservation Society, which released in 2022 and Starter Villain, which came out in 2023, and is similar to both in the believable unbelievability of the story that unfolds. When the Moon Hits Your Eye depicts what happens after the moon turns to cheese. The book is presented in a day-by-day format, and each chapter explores the impact of the moon’s sudden change on a different person or group of people. Among the characters are astronauts whose planned moon mission is suddenly cancelled, cheese store owners, space museum workers who discover that moon rocks on Earth have also turned to cheese, and ordinary people trying to make sense of it all. Scalzi’s typical wit, and his ability to make the unreal seem real enough within the confines of the story, make this a fun read. Those who enjoyed Scalzi’s last two novels should get a kick out of this one, too. (Contributed by Lisa Timpf)
News
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! April 22 we celebrate Greg Rhyno's launch of Who By Water, along with Richard Scarsbrook, Hollay Ghadery and Sara Flemington, May 27 is Dennis E Bolan touring his new book, along with Marianne Miller, Aviva Rubin and Sydney Hegele. Check in at https://emilyweedon.com/drunk-fiction for more info!
…and in the Ottawa area:
TSR Subscriber Count
We now have 341 349 subscribers! 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 hoSupport The Seaboard Reviewnorariums 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 Substack options. For the month of April, annual subscriptions are 50% off!
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Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief
