Beartown- Fredrik Backman

Beartown by Fredrik Backman is a book I've seen popping up over and over again on the blogs lately (mostly in photos with other books, as luck would have it); it wasn't until someone posted a full review that I realized the book centered around a town's hockey team. My son and I are big hockey fans (can you be anything else, living this close to Chicago? Let's just not talk about how the Blackhawks have been doing lately, though...), and I've developed a love for hockey books, so even though I had approximately nine million other books to read at the time, I still grabbed this from a display at the library last week. And my goodness, I'm so glad I did.

Beartown is the story of a washed-up, nothing town deep in the woods. Everyone says the town is finished; there's hardly anything there anymore except a winning junior hockey team that has no right to be as good as it is. If they can win big this year, maybe this town can come back; maybe that new hockey school will be built there and the commerce will follow it. The hopes and dreams of an entire town, not to mention its future economy, lie on the shoulders of these young hockey players.

A terrible incident at a party after the semi-finals will change everything, pitting neighbor against neighbor, teammate against teammate, forcing everyone to make decisions about truth, justice, and loyalty. It's not just Beartown's future that hangs in the balance; it's everyone who lives there.

This was riveting. Fredrik Backman delves deeply into human nature and presents the reader with characters who are relatable, recognizable as our friends, neighbors and family, even as they make terrible decisions that harm other people. His ability to weave a story that incorporates so many characters, so many points of view, is on par with Stephen King (whose narratives from The Stand and It are some of my absolute favorite pieces of writing; despite the length, I've read each of these multiple times throughout my life). There's violence in this story, but it's never gratuitous nor designed to shock, and having sworn off reading more Pat Conroy novels due to the graphic nature of some of his scenes, I appreciated that.

I very much enjoyed this, blowing through it in less than twenty-four hours, and I see there's a second in the series, Us Against You. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've continued on and have read this. I'm definitely interested in reading more from Fredrik Backman; I'd never heard of him until I started seeing A Man Called Ove all over the place, so I'm surprised to see how many books he's written. All the more for me to read!

Beartown does contain a rape scene, and what follows is what I think most women know to expect from humanity in general after something so terrible is made public: the doubts, the anger and threats towards the victim, people siding with the accused rapist. Knowing this, be kind to yourself and choose another book if you need to.


Visit Fredrik Backman's website here.

Follow him on Twitter here. (He tweets in both English and Swedish; I have a moderate level of Norwegian and can understand a lot of what he writes, although to me, Swedish looks like Norwegian spelled wrong. ;) )