Beartown: A Novel (Beartown Series)

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.” Wow. This book HITS. I found it to be a slow start and I felt like I was being pelted with different characters that I could hardly keep straight for awhile there, once I got past that I was so completely engaged in the town, its people, and the love of hockey. And it becomes a lot easier to remember everyone when you realize who the key players are 🙂 Beartown tackles a lot of really tough topics, and shows both the good and bad sides of humanity and community. This is a book that makes you think, but it doesn’t preach at you. It just makes really good points along with a really solid character study that sucks you in as you experience the highs and lows of a junior hockey team who has played together for a decade and all the people in the town who support them. Everyone has different reactions to the violent event, and it’s both heartbreaking and hopeful to see how it all plays out. I found the writing style really intriguing, if a bit hard to keep up with at times. It switches between the more traditional third person dialogue-style writing of character interactions and the omniscient-narrator style writing sharing a scene as someone watching from the sidelines. In some cases, we don’t even learn the names of characters integral to the story. It’s an interesting approach, and unlike anything I’ve read. Don’t dismiss this as only for hockey fans! Hockey is integral to the story, of course, but this is just a beautiful, wise story about overcoming challenges and horrors, and standing up for what you think is right. I will never forget this one, definitely has that five-star feeling!

This contemporary fiction / family drama has been a highly acclaimed bestseller in many countries. The message, clearly, resonates across the globe. It is relatable any place where there are 'haves and have nots,' or over achieving kids with overly competitive parents, or neglected kids, or over indulged kids, or loving parents, or great coaches, or tired teachers, or bullies and victims. SUMMARY The book opens with one teenager walking into the woods, pulling out a gun, pointing it at another teenager and pulling the trigger. The rest of the book explains the events leading up to this act. The book takes place in a small town on the edge of a forest called Beartown. I'm not sure exactly where Beartown is supposed to be located, but I think it's Sweden. The town has a small competitive hockey club which provides a social life as well as a source of pride for the town. Actually, that's an understatement. This town doesn't have a lot going for it at the moment; the local factory has eliminated a lot of jobs, people are moving away, those who stay don't have many employment options and to some people, the club is everything. The junior hockey team (made up of 16 and 17 years olds) is having an amazing season due, in large part, to their star player Kevin. Their coach, David, has been grooming them since they were seven years old, training them to become the stars they are today. Peter, a former Beartown Hockey star who made it to the NHL, returned to Beartown ten years ago with his family to serve as General Manager and turn the club into a national contender. Ten years of hard work has paid off and the team is about to play in they semi-finals for the junior NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP! The town has so much riding on this. They are hoping that if they win the championship, the government will decide to build their new national training center in Beartown. Along with the training center would come more shopping, restaurants, commerce and JOBS. They NEED this. This is their time. The undefeated junior team just needs to make it through two more games. But, as the reader knows, it's not going to be that simple. We know that something is about to happen which will culminate in one teenager pulling the trigger of a gun on another... WHAT I LOVED Wow!!! So much to love! How could you not be riveted by a book with an opening chapter like that? Every time a new character appeared in the book, or when two characters interacted, I obsessively over analyzed the circumstances, looking for clues as to whether or not these characters were involved in the opening scene. Trying to determine if they were the one pointing the gun or the one with the gun pointed at them. Each slight made me read too much into the offended persons reaction. Would that be enough to trigger a tragic chain of events? I couldn't stop theorizing. I needed to know. I loved the setting; a snowy small town somewhere very far north. I both loved and hated that the country was never officially named. Loved because it gave me yet another thing to obsess over and hated because I never could get a straight answer. The book cover was LOVELY! The picture of the frozen lake and surrounding town was just what I imagined. I loved the narrative style. It was almost as if the story was being told orally, from the memory of an observer, with little snippets of wisdom and knowledge of future events which the narrator had witnessed. The characters were to compelling. They all had so many dimensions. There were several characters I was ready to write off as total 'bad seeds' in their first couple of appearances, who later redeemed themselves. On the flip side, some who initially seemed quite decent disappointed me. Benji and his family were very interesting; I loved how they very loudly loved each other while simultaneously calling each other out on bad behavior. They were all up in each other's business, they were always cramming themselves into small spaces so they could be together. On the polar opposite is Kevin's family. Cold, controlled, uninvolved. His parents started leaving him alone overnight when he was like twelve years old!! What the heck!!! On the outside, it looked like Kevin had everything; money and every advantage money could buy, intelligence and an excessive amount of talent. But did he really have more than Benji? There is so much to love in this book, I could go on for days, but I won't. WHAT I DIDN'T LOVE Too much hockey detail for me. I'm not anti-hockey, I'm just not obsessed. I understand the author was trying to create a feeling of an entire town living, eating, breathing hockey but it was too much for me. I get being in a town that loves its sports. I live in Texas. It's what we do. I felt like he could have created the feeling in fewer words. OVERALL A great book. Touches on my many important topics.

Difficult themes but oh so pertinent to our world today. Its called sport fiction but that is an understatement. It's a trilogy of a continuing story that will become part of who you are and how you Live your life and think about your relationships. I became a part of the community. I think about the dynamics between the people in this story as I go through my daily life. They stayed with me, long after I finished the 3 books. I felt lost without it after I was finished. Hockey is the overall energy in the book but not what makes the story believable and long lasting. I am not a hockey fan. I find it a violent sport difficult to watch due to this roughness. Backman brings that seemingly need for hate, love, control and power out into this small community in the middle of what I envision as a beautiful but cold area of Sweden. Its real. There are characters who were difficult to like at all and then characters I wanted in my life beyond finishing the 3 books. Its like I had a personal relationship with each character in this book. Whether it be love or hate. I believe one who loves this kind of relationship with a story will enjoy Beartown trilogy immensely. It has every emotion possible. The vulnerability and softness of the characters Backman creates is almost palpable. I see the traits of them in people I know and new people I meet. Its a love story and a hate story that brought tears to me and smiles also. The twists make it a great story and the characters make it unforgettable. There are many characters to keep straight but it becomes easy once you get to know them.

This is an absolutely fabulous book. The start does build slowly as other reviews state but this is so you can fully appreciate the characters, the uniqueness of the situations and the emotions. I read the book in short sections so that I could give it my full attention and absorb the story. It is a roller coaster ride and not at all predictable. I loved the looking back in ten year references, sometimes it helped to ease my concerns for the people that had become so real to me. I want to read on and to spread the word.

best

I'm not sure I will recover from this book. Beautifully written, the author has a way like no other to make you feel every emotion. You'll become a part of Beartown and some characters will hold a special place in your heart only to break it when you least expect it. Check the TW - there is a difficult part to read in this book.

Even if you aren't interested in sport, this book is a compulsive read. Dying Beartown in an inhospitable part of Sweden is fanatical about ice hockey. Ice hockey forms characters, relationships and town identity. When the juniors win their semi-final the town gears up for the final in a major way. What happens next is complicated, and I won't spoil the plot, except to say that it's major, and we get to see a whole town searching its conscience. The characters come from all circumstances in life and the author does a brilliant job of understanding them all, whether rich or poor, foreign or native-born, etc. How they react to the crisis makes for tense reading, and the book is so well-plotted that we get a sense of impending doom without being able to pick who will do what. It's a superb portrait of the psychological aspects of sport and of the ways we react when accusations are flying and sides are taken. The closing of ranks by the powerful we expect, but it becomes more complex than that. We applaud mightily when there are acts of courage and understanding that are unexpected. The book's prime strength is in its portrayal of personality and motivation, and it's also remarkable that we can be presented with so many different and memorable characters so very clearly without getting them mixed up. First class.

"Community is the fact that we work toward the same goal, that we accept our respective roles in order to reach it. Values is the fact that we trust each other. That we love each other.For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” When I started reading this book, I was expecting a warm uplifting story of a small town hockey club like the previous works by this same author. Let me tell you, I was in for quiet a shock. The story begins in a small town called Beartown, which is largely dying due to the lack of oppurtunities and resources. The one thing that holds the town together is the hockey club, which is their pride and joy. The hockey players are idolised and treated like legends. Multiple characters who play a crucial role in the story are introduced in the beginning. We get to have a glimpse of their loves, their dreams, hopes and fears in the initial pages of the book. What follows after that is the incident, that impacts the entire town and shakes it down to its core. Its raw and its heartbreaking. It will test beliefs, loyalties and friendships. “Most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.” The story is told in a matter-of-fact almost detached style and that is what makes it so poignant and heart-rending. But even at the height of despair, there is always an underlying thread of hope weaved through the entire story that makes this book unputdownable. The true beauty of the book lies in that ray of hope which makes you laugh even in the midst of tears. Many serious issues like rape, bullying, small town politics and ostracisation are dealt with a lot of sensitivity and empathy. When I finally turned the last page of this book, it left me with a profound sense of hope which is the best possible thing a book can gift you. I highly, HIGHLY, recommend you to give this book a chance. I promise you, you won't regret it. Meanwhile, I will be counting down the days to the release of its sequel. Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️