#59 Beartown

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

So i heard a LOT about this book towards the end of 2018, everyone that read it on my GR seemed to give it 5 stars. All i knew was that it was about a rape that happens in a small hockey town and how everyone in the town deals with it.

I was very pumped to start this and 150 pages in and NOTHING had happened except a bunch of teens played hockey, which at this point i should mention i know literally nothing about. There is a lot of characters introduced and some have more back story than others but it was quite tricky to remember who was who and how they were relevant, in the end i had to do a bit of a 'family tree' type drawing as i was so confused.


So the main players (excuse the pun) in this story are:

• Kevin- 17 year old star player on the junior hockey team, probably the best hockey player that Beartown has ever seen. He is an only child, has grown up in an affluent home but his parents really dont know how to be parents
• Peter & Kira- Peter is the GM of the hockey team and is so very invested in getting Beartown back on the hockey map. Kira his wife is a lawyer, they have 2 children together Maya and Leo.
• Maya- 15 year old who nearly died as a little girl, she is close with her parents and her best friend Ana
• Amat- also 15 years old, he is on the younger hockey team but is put on the junior team before the semi-final as he is the fastest player on the younger team. His mother is a cleaner at the ice rink and raised him alone. He is also in love with Maya.
• Benji- Kevins best friend. His father committed suicide in the forest of Beartown when he was younger. He is an aggressive player on the junior team. He is very close to his 3 sisters and mum. Also has a drug problem.

The story kicks off around the 184 page mark which is ridiculous that it took that amount of pages for something to happen but wow did it pack a punch. It made for very difficult reading. One thing i will say is that Backman has handled this topic very very well and a massive kudos to his translator Neil Smith as this was written in Swedish originally i believe and was translated impeccably.

This was really difficult to read as a mother of a daughter. I was so conflicted as i understood a lot of view points, some wrong and some right. The characters were written so perfectly, they were so real and you could imagine Beartown existing. A stand out character for me was Amat, hes impoverished but he loves hockey. He has to choose between doing whats right and hockey and for the majority of the second half of the book i really didnt know what he would choose.

Benji is also an amazingly complex character that i fell in love with, he was so rough around the edges but possibly the only character in this whole book that did the right thing from the very beginning regardless of what it cost him.

I honestly could gush about this book all day, it was just so well done. The ending is beautifully wrapped up, i was actually very shocked to find that it had a sequel (which ive already downloaded) but i can only hope that it follows a few of the characters 10 years later but we will see.

My first 5 star read of 2019!