Press Clippings

I am Planta: On the Line. This is THECOMMENTARY.CA.

The Sea Captain’s Wife is a new book from Beth Powning. It’s described as a gripping novel of love and obsession set on the high seas of the 1860’s. It takes us from the Bay of Fundy, where Azuba Galloway was born and where she often dreams of seeing the world. She marries a captain, but she can’t see the world as she’d like. Beth Powning is the author of The Hatbox Letters, Edge Seasons, and Shadow Child.

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New Brunswick's Beth Powning lets her imagination run away from her in The Sea Captain's Wife. This turns out to be just fine, as we lucky readers get to go along for the voyage.

It's highbrow Harlequin meets high-seas adventure. Powning gussies up both forms: Rather than typical "boy-meet girl" romance, her love story anatomizes a struggling young marriage; rather than a salty sailor, this ocean epic recounts the escapades of a sea-faring wife.

Click Here to read the full article on the Toronto Star

New Brunswick's storied age of sail came alive Jan. 15 at the Sussex Legion as Beth Powning launched her new historical novel, The Sea Captain's Wife. More than 500 people attended, enjoying chowder, historical displays and nautical art that complemented the reading and book signing. The author, family and friends even donned period dress for an extra element of authenticity. Ahoy!

Click here to view article on the Telegraph Journal

For travellers, virtual and actual, The Sea Captain's Wife offers a fine and variegated journey: back in time (to the 1860s) and around the world on a merchant sailing ship.

Azuba Galloway Bradstock, the book's protagonist, born and raised in coastal New Brunswick, within sight, sound and scent of the sea, loves her town but yearns to see and know the wider world.

Click here to read the full review on the Globe and Mail

Beth Powning’s second novel is the affecting and engaging story of a young woman seeking her place in the world – a place away from the loneliness and boredom of a small Canadian village.

Azuba is the young wife of Nathaniel, an older man who captains the Traveller, a commercial ship. The couple originally planned to travel together, but when Azuba becomes pregnant, Nathaniel realizes he cannot jeopardize his wife’s safety or that of his unborn child by taking her aboard his ship.

Maritime-based literary writer Beth Powning, author of the successful Hatbox Letters and the nature-themed memoirEdge Seasons, proves her versatility with her latest novel,The Sea Captain's Wife.

Part historical fiction, part love story and part tragedy, it is bound together by the strengths of Powning's signature nature writing.

Whelan's Cove is a place of departures."

So begins Beth Powning's latest novel, The Sea Captain's Wife, a tale of the eternals of departures, relationships, and growth, revealed against the historical backdrop of the seagoing past of nineteenth century New Brunswick. The reader departs the present day, departs the New Brunswick in which we live, just as the titular character, Azuba, departs the life she knows, the Victorian New Brunswick familiar to her, to embark on her dramatic journey. And we, in turn, escape into her well-crafted world for a few hundred pages.

Click here to read the full review on the Telegraph Journal

There is no water view from Beth Powning's farmhouse, but the author still feels the tidal pull from her Markhamville home. The seafaring, shipbuilding past of the Bay of Fundy deeply inspired her latest work, 'The Sea Captain's Wife,' an ambitious historical novel rich in adventure.

Click Here to read the entire article on the Telegraph Journal.

BY VERONICA ROSS

 

Stories about the past can be so much more interesting than tales of the present day. The present is still formless. Who know what will happen tomorrow, how things will turn out in the mysterious future?

But much is known about the past. All those details always seem exotic to me — like the celery "vases" that grace the dining room table at Woodside National Historic Site in Kitchener and the lovely dishes and old piano in the parlour. These artifacts cast a patina over what can only be imagined about the lives lived there (Sunday afternoon ennui, the women suffering from their corsets and so on).

Click Here to read full review on Guelph Mercury Review, or use the download link below.

Readers will find a streak of the poetic in all of Beth Powning's work, including her new novel, The Sea Captain's Wife. As in her two wonderfully wrought memoirs, Edge Seasons and Shadow Child and in her widely lauded first novel, The Hatbox Letters, the New Brunswick writer proves a master of descriptive dexterity. Her keen eye for landscape and for detail give her work a rewarding resonance.

 Click here to read the full article on the London Free Press