“The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction is a greatest-hits ensemble.”
“All the work is of high quality.”
“Breakwater asked [Larry Mathews] to edit, and his reasoning behind each story makes for a nice prologue. The end result is ten stories that showcase and emphasize how well the sentence-level writing is in local fiction.”
With the quality of the writing uniformly high throughout, what is there to quibble with? We could take issue with the absence of some notable names, such as Wayne Johnston, Kenneth J. Harvey, Donna Morrissey, Michelle Butler Hallett and Robin McGrath. But then one remembers that Larry Mathews faced an impossible task when he agreed to edit this volume because in the last thirty years Newfoundland has produced more than its fair share of excellent writers of fiction, and an anthology that included everybody whose work deserves recognition would be unwieldy and possibly too heavy to lift. The very act of making a selection means that good work by talented writers is going to be left out. But The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction more than fulfills its mandate, by bringing together into one volume a rich and varied sampling of the best fiction Newfoundland has to offer.
– The Antigonish Review