Book Review: Year of the Puffin

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

A quirky and compelling work of sports fiction surrounding an Icelandic football team

Gregory Phipps’ Year of the Puffin focuses on the lives of Tommie Gatz, the university’s athletic director; Gwen Arnheim the coach; and the two quarterbacks, Lambert Slusher and Dorian Stark IV.  As The Puffins strive toward a record-breaking season, Phipps shifts focus from one to another of these four characters as they deal with death, love, and heartbreak in their own offbeat ways. Year of the Puffin carries all the tension of a neck-and-neck football game through the personal dramas of its characters, a demonstration of how a winning season occurs both on and off the field. 

Gwen Arnheim is a Canadian who moved to Iceland to become the only female coach of a Division II male football team. It is post-pandemic, the country is reawakening, and Gwen and athletic director Tommie Gatz are gearing up for a winning season. Everything changes when Tommie suggests that Gwen utilize a play called the Wishbone. Though outdated, the play just might work, but only if Gwen pulls the team leader, Lambert Slusher, and replaces him with her second string QB, Dorian Stark. 

Gwen also doesn’t know that Tommie has a slush fund he’s been using to recruit players from US schools. As the season rolls on in a series of exciting games in both the US and Iceland, more secrets emerge. Dorian’s mental health flags beneath the pressure of his double life, and Lambert’s frustration with his decreased playing time is exacerbated by his history of growing up in a cult and his current problems with a girlfriend he has never met. Add to this already illustrious cast of characters a lazy maintenance man who ignores his phone calls, a sports anchor who wants to uncover the personal lives of the players, and the son of a former president, and you have Year of the Puffin, an offbeat and beautifully place-driven dive into the lives of the most unlikely sports team you’ve ever witnessed. Win or lose, the season will be wild. 

Phipps builds layers of tension slowly in a way that makes the book difficult to put down. A chapter may begin with Gwen’s emotional reaction at a funeral, before cutting away to Dorian and Lambert arguing in a hotel room, only to end on Tommie walking the streets of Iceland. The perspective jumps are seamless, each character fully realized and complex enough to make each shift in perspective easy to catch up to and comprehend. And each character is real and quirky enough to drag the reader through a range of emotions. While a brooding lovelorn Lambert lurches through his senior year, Phipps draws on Lambert’s lack of coordination and his naivety just enough to add some comic relief to a serious character. Similarly, Tommie’s blunders knock him around throughout his midlife crisis in a sad comedy of poor decisions.

On top of the quirky characters is Phipps’ depiction of Iceland itself as a “tropical island with no warmth, an innocent place where nature ruled, and people saw no need to begin today what they could put off until tomorrow.” Iceland itself becomes a character with its strong winds knocking down the football during an important play or its cold rain washing out a practice. Iceland is volcanos, wind, and rain, but also small cities and enthusiastic fans. This is a place that can laugh at itself, can see the strangeness of their own football team, but also cheer along with each win with pride. 

As a sports novel, only a few pages of Year of the Puffin actually depict the playing of a game, but its message is that the game of football is much more than these plays. Anyone with interest in distinct and eccentric characters and with a will to spend some time in the unique world that is Iceland will find enjoyment in these pages.

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