Author Charles LeoGrande offers a glimpse of early 1970’s pro wrestling with his novella Green. It’s reasonable size at 111 pages, published November 30, 2016, and runs just 99-cents at Amazon.

I can feel the author’s emotions in the writing, and indeed, LeoGrande admits his pro-wrestling career took him many places, but this isn’t the big time. Green is a  beginning and the minor leagues of wrestling, the bacon and beans circuit, and the protagonist is a draft-age kid who leaves New York in 1971 for Canada and falls into a job (not unlike a rock roadie, “set ’em up and tear ’em down again”) with a seasoned veteran making his way from Montreal to Hamilton, to the Calgary Stampede.

The writing is reasonable, the pace moderate, and it’s not about developing characters and their motivation, it’s a story of youth, and wrestling, and blood, and showmanship. How can you not love a character who says, “My eyelids got heavy— the beating of bodies slamming down on the mat lulling me.”

Three Stars