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
Bad Juliet by Giles Blunt
Everyone has their beach read recommendations ready to fly this time of year. And it is manna from heaven for an author to be declared a beach read. Deemed worthy of taking away to the beach, so vacationers can read and allow their brain to detach and their cares to melt. There’s a suggestion in the moniker that a beach read is not going to be a challen…
Fiction
Finding Flora by Elinor Florence
Full of suspense, courage and resilience, Elinor Florence gives us a pioneer story like no other in her new novel Finding Flora, which follows Flora’s journey as she attempts to prosper in a new land. Toiling from sunup to sundown, Flora faces challenges she had not anticipated when she left Scotland to settle on the Alberta prairies. With the help of h…
Non-Fiction
In Search of Puffins by Marjorie Simmins
I was always going to read this book; a memoir, in part, about Marjorie’s move from Cape Breton to Truro, Nova Scotia. I wanted to read an account of a newcomer moving to the town I’ve lived in for the past 22 years. But, now that I’ve read it, I can recommend it to any reader interested in literature about loss and grief, belonging and starting over; u…
The Teachings of Mutton by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa
The Teachings of Mutton, A Coast Salish Woolly Dog is an apt title. This book written by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa, with Coast Salish contributors, follows Hammond-Kaarremaa’s efforts to track down information about Coast Salish Woolly Dogs generally and a dog named Mutton in particular. But Hammond-Kaarremaa’s research, and her discussions with Coast Salis…
The Teachings of Mutton by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa
Bigger! Better! Badder! WrestleMania III and the Year It All Changed by Keith Elliot Greenberg
“Whatcha Gonna Do, When HulkaMania Runs Wild On You”
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is best known for her first novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, once again displays her brilliant writing style and offers autobiographical context for her fiction. If the book’s title is taken from the Beatles’ Let It Be, then the epigraph to her memoir belongs to John B…
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)
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