A Seal of Salvage

Steeped in Newfoundland’s unique folklore and superstitions, A Seal of Salvage is a coming-of-age novel about unrequited love between adolescent boys that slips between history and mythology.

Set in 1950s rural outport Newf... oundland and blending historical fiction with magic realism, A Seal of Salvage follows orphan Oliver Brown’s coming of age as a queer outsider. Oliver’s life in the small community of Salvage is overshadowed by lingering rumours about his mother, her mysterious past, and her untimely death.

But as Oliver grows up, he experiences a remarkable series of events of mythic proportions. Stories of Oliver’s mother become entangled with the folklore of the Selkie: people of the sea who live in the water as seals and come to land to find love as humans. While mostly unspoken, the speculations about Oliver’s bloodline become another excuse the town uses to marginalize him.

A Seal of Salvage explores the space where the natural and supernatural meet, as well as how the stories people tell can be fashioned to justify their own prejudice.

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arielaonthego

Location:

Saint John, New Brunswick

average rating is 2 out of 5

Time Published

A Seal of Salvage Book Review

I picked up this book because it promised a bit of small town drama, and some mythology elements as well. Selkies have always interested me ever since I first learned about them. The legend goes that selkie women would take off their seal skins and play as human women on the beaches. Then, men from the nearby towns, fisherman, and sailors, usually, would steal the skins and hide them away. The selkie women, trapped, with no way of returning to the sea, forced to become their wives and start a life on land. When they had a chance, whenever they found the seal skins again, they would take them, turn back into seals, and abandon their lives on land.

If you simply read the synopsis of this book, or are even familiar with selkies in mythology, it is incredibly obvious that Oliver Brown, the young main character of this novel, is a selkie (or is at least part selkie). So something that wasn’t too clear to me was why exactly it had to keep being teased. At around the 100 page mark, it still wasn’t fully revealed. It’s very confusing to me how this book was written, I truly think that it should have started with the old tale of selkies first, and then we would get introduced to Oliver much late in the book.

If I’m being completely honest, the beginning of this book is a bit of a slog. The only thing that saves it is the writing style and prose. While a good amount of events happen, about 3-4 chapters were dedicated solely to locals gossiping in a room over a cup of tea. If you like reading about that, then by all means, have fun with this book, but I found a good portion of it to just be skippable dialogue. I scanned most of these scenes, and found that it didn’t really affect the plot. I found a good portion of this book a bit boring at times, because other than Oliver saving Jonathan and Oliver learning about selkies for the first time, there’s not much else? I was more interested in the mythology more than anything, and it’s the reason why I picked this book up in the first place. But the wait to get there was very long, and not really worth it, in my opinion.

Oliver is fine as a character, he’s likeable and all that, but it’s hard to read about him without feeling sorry for him because everyone just hates him. Not a lot of thee other characters were too fleshed out either. I understand that this book is supposed to be like an oral retelling of Oliver’s story, and it does alright with that. This book does well for what it is, but I think it could have benefitted from being structured differently.

The positives of this book are: the writing style/prose, the folklore, the new words I learned, the visual imagery and scenes that this book evokes, and the pretty cover. But other than that? I think it’s a book with lost potential.

I recommend this book.

Julia

Location:

average rating is 4 out of 5

Time Published

Great book

Book: A Seal Of Salvage
Author: Clayton B. Smith
Publisher: Breakwater Books

A huge thank you to Digitally Lit for supplying me with this awesome book!

A Seal Of Salvage is a folklore tale about a young boy named Oliver, who is born part seal who has to experience life different from his fellow peers. He quickly learns about who he is and decides that being nice to other people is better than saving himself.

This book is set in the beautiful Newfoundland outport town of Salvage. I loved how I could almost imagine Salvage and the ocean.

My favourite part of the book was the Christmas chapter because it reminded me of Christmas in St. Shotts. During Christmas time, everyone would come over for a yarn!

Overall, I liked the character development of Oliver, and learning about Salvage. At first I didn’t like how the story was told in third person but I quickly started to like it!
I rate it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5

I recommend this book.