Beartown

Author: Fredrik Backman
Reviewer: Inopinion

Content Warnings

Sexual Assault, Minor Violence, Strong Language

Summary

There is no Beartown without hockey. Maybe there was before the factories closed and the businesses moved away but not now, not with the economics of the entire city teetering on the announcement of a new Hockey Academy. The deal is simple, if Beartown’s junior hockey club wins their league, the council will place a new Hockey Academy in Beartown. With the Academy come families, new construction, new stores and even a conference center with restaurants and opportunity. All this is contingent on the 16-17 year old boys winning.

Fortunately for the town, the junior team is as solid as they come and they have a weapon in Kevin Urdall.

When accusations fly, the town turns inward. What is usually termed “off-ice issues” becomes whole-town-problems. There’s the victim, the accused, the witnesses, the families, and the friendships made and broken as the narrative visits dozens of perspectives throughout the town.

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Review

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

When I first started this book, I felt oddly resentful that I’d fallen into a sports-book and doggedly settled into hour after hour of what would undoubtedly become an inspirational feel-good story. This is because I didn’t read the synopsis and I came in blind to the entire thing other than the persistent mention by penpals and book-friends that I should read this book. Last year, I read A Man Called Ove and found it a pleasure to read and an inspirational uplift, so I anticipated the same. Boy what I got was so much more.

Beartown doles out it’s information in a sophisticated layering of character, backstory, and reactionary plot points. It’s a style that I feel certain, after two books, is judiciously applied in Backman’s works. And it’s incredibly effective at building curiosity and anticipation as each character is opened up and unpacked one by one. The plot inches it’s way through the cast like a true crime author painting the scene. It continues to do so as the friends, family, and townsfolk process the aftermath. I cannot express how completely satisfied I am with this style of storytelling. It’s because of this style that I make comparisons to Celeste Ng and even true crime writers like Michelle McNamara.

One of a few tired points is the internal struggles of Kira Andersson, the mother, the wife, the accomplished lawyer. I feel like Backman’s use of the guilty-professional-mother stereotype is a bit tired. Everywhere I look, media portrays the guilt of the working-mom. That she feels like she’s missing out, not doing enough, working too much, not working enough, that she’s failing at the same time that she’s succeeding. It talks about resentment and guilt for putting family first and also for putting career first because women can’t have it all without a heavy slice of guilt. And when presented in nuanced terms and in relation to specific situations (like a recital, a business trip, a big school play), I think this narrative can strike home with even the least sentimental of mothers (me). However, it came over heavy-handed to the point that I even voiced this complaint to my husband. I am so damn tired of being told that I should be feeling guilt, or that this is a universal experience, or that it’s not normal to just carry-on. Call it a pet-peeve.

An area that I did think was immensely valuable to hear from a male author with a fairly substantial platform was the condemnation of victim blaming. He paints a thoroughly grotesque picture of the townspeople that side blindly against the victim. Anyone that’s ever espoused the same sentiments must surely be reading this book with shame, or else not finishing it at all. It is a 100% shutdown and call-out of the mob-mentality and boys-first perspectives faced by women reporting sexual assault and harassment. He throws in a few solid jabs a homophobia while he’s at it and I’m thankful he did.

I strongly hope this becomes a book studied and analyzed in classrooms specifically because of the clear stance it takes on social issues desperately in need of being addressed.

Similar books: Structured and executed in a similar style to Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You. In the same vein as Backman’s A Man Called Ove which holds many comparisons to the novels of Wallace Stegner.

Appeal: This adult contemporary contains several timely social issues and provides point and counterpoint to the arguments batted across the divide in the #metoo era. It asks many questions like who really raises children? Why do some people grow up to be entitled and others to be empathetic, can they be both? When the youth act out, are the parents to blame or the community? How do you protect your children and when do you realize you can’t?

If you’re a YA reader, this book will not deliver the usual first person perspective, but it will give you a close connection to many points of view. Through this careful narrative you’ll see the dichotomy of feelings and values spread between victim, bystander, and parent.

If you already consume a steady adult contemporary diet, you’ll see more of the teen perspective than a typical Adult narrative including the social impact of speaking up and the hardships on the children when one of the family is a victim of violence.

Everyone has something to gain from reading this layered perspective.