By Molly Rookwood

As a lifelong ocean person, I was delighted by the opportunity to read and review Clayton B. Smith’s A Seal of Salvage, a queer coming-of-age story about selkie mythology set in a small Newfoundland fishing town. And, reader, this little book did not disappoint.

It took a good few pages before the book really hooked me. I struggled a little to get into the flow and cadence of the sentences, and the introductory line of, “If, for some reason, you fancy hearing the story of Oliver’s time in Salvage, Mrs. Genge is who you should find,” didn’t work that well for me since I didn’t know yet why I would fancy hearing Oliver’s story.

But then came the line that made me fall for Smith’s writing. We’ve moved on from the “There’s going to be a story; get ready” section into the story itself, and as a strange woman appears at a wedding celebration, Smith writes, “She was the moonlight through stained glass, the space between the fiddle and the shanty, the calm between rolling breaths.” I loved this line. “The space between the fiddle and the shanty” in particular rolls beautifully around my brain. I love the image and simultaneously the lack of one — it’s so ephemeral and fleeting, exactly as the character is.

This is a book in which form mirrors content in a truly beautiful way. The writing is rhythmic and flowing, mirroring the ocean, which is omnipresent throughout the book. In every encounter, every scene, the ocean is present in one way or another, and back-and-forth progression of the story seems to match its tides.

Although I found the shifting from past tense to present tense to be occasionally a bit jarring — sometimes Oliver and companions appear in the present, despite the story taking place primarily in past tense — I quite liked that the chapters themselves shift back and forth through time. Smith does a great job establishing when in the story we are at the start of each chapter, so there’s no confusion, but in a large way, it also doesn’t matter.

There’s a sense of timelessness in the town and in Oliver’s story. In some ways, it’s unimportant that Oliver is eleven when he rescues Johnathan from the water, eighteen when he saves a floundering boat in the harbour. Oliver as a character feels out of time, out of step with the world around him, and it works beautifully.

The queer coming-of-age story between Oliver and Johnathan was a surprisingly small part of the story. Johnathan is mentioned in the opening pages of the story as Rebecca’s eventual husband, so from the first moments in the story where we see a spark between him and Oliver, we know already that there is no happy ending for them. I was surprised, though, that there was barely even a story for them in the middle. Oliver is drawn to Johnathan, and their friendship approaches something more, but when the moment is stolen from them, it fades into the past.

I would have liked to see a bit more reflection from Oliver in the time that follows about how the encounter affected him. We see a bit of heartache as Johnathan and Rebecca’s relationship unfolds, but the homophobia he faces feels somewhat undeveloped. The book’s blurb posits the story as a “coming-of-age novel about unrequited love between adolescent boys,” but I would say that the love is not unrequited, at least in the moment, and it’s also not really what the story is about. The romance was a relatively minor part of the story, and I think readers looking for a queer coming-of-age novel might be disappointed as a result.

For what is was, though—a love letter to the ocean, an unromanticized picture of a Newfoundland town, a tapestry of folklore and mythology — A Seal of Salvage stole my heart. I loved how thoroughly the selkie mythology is engrained in the soul of the community: though the townsfolk might dismiss the folklore as mere stories, every person in the town has an innate suspicious about who Oliver is, long before he has any inkling himself.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a beautiful story set beside a stormy sea, anyone fascinated by folklore, anyone who knows what it is to feel the pull of the waves.

Content warnings in this book include: homophobia, suggestions of mental illness and postpartum depression, emotional neglect, and parent death. None of these things is overly graphic, but readers with sensitivities to them should be prepared to encounter them within the pages.

Molly Rookwood is a freelance editor, bookseller at the King’s Co-op Bookstore, and Jewish romance writer based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. When she’s not reading, writing, editing, or selling books, Molly sings, plays D&D, and lectures unprompted about Jane Austen to anyone willing to listen.