Love, Prairie Women, Memoirs, Woolly Dogs, WrestleMania III & More!
Volume 2, Issue 28 of The Seaboard Review of Books, July 28, 2025
In this issue:
Bad Juliet by Giles Blunt
Finding Flora by Elinor Florence
In Search of Puffins by Marjorie Simmins
The Teachings of Mutton by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa
Bigger! Better! Badder! WrestleMania III and the Year It All Changed by Keith Elliot Greenberg
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Review of the Week
Fiction
Non-Fiction
The Teachings of Mutton by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
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)
Soccer Grannies: The South African Women Who Inspire the World, by Jean Duffy, is a non-fiction book that could just as well read as the script of a triumph-against-the-odds movie. The Soccer Grannies, as Jean Duffy first came to know them, were a team composed, quite literally, of South African grandmothers—women in their 40s to their 80s.
Duffy learned of the Grannies through a video forwarded to her by a soccer teammate. Despite the 7,875-mile distance between her home in Lexington, Massachusetts, and the Grannies’ home in Nkowankowa, Limpopo, Jean felt a connection. Jean, along with other key figures from her own team and others in the league, began a campaign to bring the Soccer Grannies to play in the annual Veterans Cup, which in 2010 was scheduled to be held in Massachusetts.
The book describes the ups and downs of the fundraising campaign to enable the Grannies to make the trip, the experience of hosting the South African team in the United States, and a subsequent visit to South Africa by Duffy and others. Duffy’s book is a testament to sport’s power to build bridges between people through a shared love of the game. (Contributed by Lisa Timpf)
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Ever since my first exposure to John Scalzi’s writing, which if I recall correctly was the novel Redshirts, I’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s wittiness and world-building. Starter Villain, published in 2023, was no exception. In Starter Villain, Charlie, a basically decent guy who is somewhat down-and-out due to life’s circumstances, is thrown into weird, challenging, and sometimes threatening situations, and has to rely on his wits and his common sense to navigate his new surroundings.
Charlie inherits a business left to him by his Uncle Jake, who was estranged from the family after the death of Charlie’s mother. As Charlie soon discovers, Uncle Jake’s business involved dealing with super villains, many of whom hated his uncle. Like many of Scalzi’s books, Starter Villain is full of inventive and off-beat phenomena like, in this case, intelligent cats and super-smart but foul-mouthed dolphins. The action kept me hooked, and many of the plot twists were unexpected but believable within the story’s context. A fun read. (Contributed by Lisa Timpf)
Book News
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Emily Weedon’s Drunk Fiction
The Seaboard Review of Books is sponsoring “Drunk Fiction”! One of the books for sale at the event will be free for a lucky attendee. Mark your calendars for August 26yh! The Caledonian is at 856 College Street in Toronto. Drink responsibly, read voraciously!
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Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief
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