Fredrik Backman

A town this small can't afford to take sides. But when the worst happens, whose side would you take? Late one evening towards the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barrelled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else's forehead and pulled the trigger. This is the story of how we got there. Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together - or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. Change is in the air and a bright new future is just around the corner. Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten, and those who'll risk the future to see justice done. At last, it falls to one young man to find the courage to speak the truth that it seems no one else wants to hear. With the town's future at stake, no one can stand by or stay silent. Everyone is on one side or the other. Which side would you be on?

The Scandal

A poignant story of a hockey town paralyzed by scandal. Jobs are disappearing and Beartown is slowly dying, so for its citizens, hockey is everything. This is the story not just of hockey, but of a 15-year-old named Maya Andersson, whose father, Peter, the general manager of the hockey club, loves hockey, but loves his family more. Seventeen-year-old Kevin Erdahl is the star of Beartown, with a chance to go professional. One night, after a huge win, Maya goes to a raucous party at Kevin's house and is thrilled at his attention, but things get out of hand, and what takes place changes Beartown forever.

A Novel

Beartown

Cara 🤍

Perhaps one day the man in the black jacket will think about this too: why he only wonder if it was Kevin or Amat who was telling the truth. Why Maya’s word wasn’t enough 

Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep. 

You might have learned to lose like a man. You might have learned that your son can make mistakes, and when he does you ought to stand up like a man and take responsibility for that. Not come here and dump all the blame on a fifteen-year-old girl and her father. 

They laugh. How powerful that is, the fact that they can still make each other do that. 

People were so quick to decide what the truth was that they bought pay-as-you-go phones just to be able to tell her what she is without her knowing who they are

Most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with. 

You might be playing with bears. But that doesn’t mean you have to forget that you’re a lion. 

Trying to be the right kind of guy. Even if it’s impossible to be the right kind of mum at the same time. 

Perhaps grabbing someone’s arm is the correct response. But both Benji and the teacher know that it should have been Benji’s. 

The teacher has always been told she’s too young for this. Too attractive. That they won’t respect her. Those boys have been told that they’re bears, winners, immortal. 

Laura Dobie

There's always someone who's worse. You can get almost anything to look normal if you make enough comparisons.

It's a peculiar sort of angst, the one he lives with, knowing that you had the greatest moment in your life at the age of seventeen. While he was growing up everyone kept telling him he was going to turn professional, and he believed them so intensely that when he didn't make it, he took it to mean that everyone else had let him down, as if somehow it wasn't his own fault. He wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

 ‘And what do we want, Ramona? What can the sport give us? We devote our whole lives to it, and what can we hope to get, at best? A few moments ... a few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are, a few isolated opportunities to imagine that we're ... immortal. And it's a lie. It really isn't important.’

Ramona pours herself a glass of whisky. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day.

All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we're going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.

When the wind blows off the lake at this time of year, it feels like your face is being torn by ghosts.

We love winners, even though they're very rarely particularly likeable people. They're almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn't matter. We forgive them. We like them while they're winning.

They'll replace Sune with the coach of the junior team, for one simple reason: when Sune talks to his players before matches, he gives long speeches about them playing with their hearts. When the junior team coach stands in the locker room, he says just one word: ‘Win.’ And the juniors win. They've done nothing else for ten years. 

It's just that Sune is no longer sure that's all a hockey team should consist of: boys who never lose.

🌞Laur🌞

And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming. 

Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stringer than pride. 

You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up. 

what are principles worth, if you don’t win? 

ellie🤍

"Concentrate on the things you can change.”

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with a dazzling, profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true. People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys. Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected. Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

beartown is a book that wants to convince you. at first, you don’t want to be convinced. you flinch back; you’re embarrassed by how desperate the book wants to convince you. but the book holds on. tells you ‘look, look!’ and so i looked and read and read until dread filled my whole body and all i could think was a loop of 

. about halfway through i realised that, to me, this book feels like a longer thesis on maggie smith’s good bones poem –

“Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

the book tries to convince you that the love is there. and most of the time this love is ugly, harmful, destructive. but the absence of love would make everything even worse. the love was there and it didn’t change everything, but it changed something. it gave the characters the strength to hold on.

lara

beartown is a book that wants to convince you. at first, you don’t want to be convinced. you flinch back; you’re embarrassed by how desperate the book wants to convince you. but the book holds on. tells you ‘look, look!’ and so i looked and read and read until dread filled my whole body and all i could think was a loop of ohmygod. about halfway through i realised that, to me, this book feels like a longer thesis on maggie smith’s good bones poem –

“Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

the book tries to convince you that the love is there. and most of the time this love is ugly, harmful, destructive. but the absence of love would make everything even worse. the love was there and it didn’t change everything, but it changed something. it gave the characters the strength to hold on.

Winning a junior ice hockey championship might not mean a lot to the average person, but it means everything to the residents of Beartown, a community slowly being eaten alive by unemployment and the surrounding wilderness. A victory like this would draw national attention to the ailing town: it could attract government funding and an influx of talented athletes who would choose Beartown over the big nearby cities. A victory like this would certainly mean everything to Amat, a short, scrawny teenager who is treated like an outcast everywhere but on the ice; to Kevin, a star player just on the cusp of securing his golden future in the NHL; and to Peter, their dedicated general manager whose own professional hockey career ended in tragedy. At first, it seems like the team might have a shot at fulfilling the dreams of their entire town. But one night at a drunken celebration following a key win, something happens between Kevin and the general manager's daughter--and the next day everything seems to have changed. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected. With so much riding on the success of the team, the line between loyalty and betrayal becomes difficult to discern. At last, it falls to one young man to find the courage to speak the truth that it seems no one else wants to hear.

What a great story. Definitely read like a book created for homework but it wasn’t! It just fits so nicely and I’d say that’s a good thing. Forgot about who Backman was for a sec and when I realized it didn’t take place in the states I started to like it a lot more. Someone the character POVs felt nonessential, but maybe that was the point. Not everything has to be entirely plot relevant and circle back, Eli! Thank you Billie Fogarty for telling me to read this like six years ago, you were right and I liked it a lot. I only found one translation error and it wasn’t even a big deal.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

one of those books that will stick with you for a long time

This was a dudes sports fueled Twilight, easy to rip through, melodramatic, and oozing with cheese. Fun.

Jacob Hopkins

Sarah Erle

Maureen

"So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side. Because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time."

***

Honestly worth all the hype it's received. I don't care much for sports, but there's just something special about the way Backman writes about hockey— he makes it come alive. There are so many characters that it was hard to keep up with all of them at first, but they're all fleshed out so well throughout the story that by the time you get to the end, you feel like you know each and every one of them by heart. 

Beartown is not just about hockey. It puts a premium on community and tackles heavy themes like blind loyalty, victim blaming, and gender inequality. But really, this book is packed with so much more. 

I've been putting off Book 2 because I don't feel quite ready for it yet; but it's safe to say that reading Beartown has been a pleasant experience.

Ryan Mateyk

Ehhh was debating between 4 and 5 stars, but any book that has me reading 250 pages in one day is definitely deserving of 5. I know I’m a few years late on this one. It reminds me of a simpler but no less affecting We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates - how the actions of one night can have lasting impacts. Rather than examining the family as in the Mulvaneys, this looks at the effects that one night has on a whole town. I wasn’t really drawn in for the first 100 pages or so (hockey is... boring!!!) but it obviously had my interest after the ‘event’ happened (tryna keep it spoiler free hun)

sarah

~more like a 4.5/5 
dont remember the last time i cried so much reading a book ??? fredrik backman has such an intense way of writing, so heartbreakingly beautiful! really encourages me to slow down when reading; just to soak up all of his imagery, descriptions, and literary choices. only critique would be sometimes characters would be hard to keep track of, but loved how complex each one of them were. will be thinking about this book for a while, ahhhhhh

Winning a junior ice hockey championship means everything to the residents of Beartown, a struggling community slowly being eaten alive by unemployment and an steadily encroaching wilderness. Victory could attract government funding and an influx of talented athletes who would choose Beartown over the big nearby cities. Victory would mean everything to outcast Amat, to golden boy and star player Kevin, and to dedicated general manager Peter, whose own professional hockey career ended too early. When scandal erupts following a drunken celebration after a key win, no resident is unaffected. With so much riding on the success of the team, the line between loyalty and betrayal becomes difficult to discern.--

Jordan

Greer Andersson

✰✰✰✰✰
Long story short: I adore Backman’s writing and his ability to convey such complex emotions in such simple writing. For people who love character centric novels, consider picking this one up. With that being said, be prepared to have to put your thinking caps on, cause good lord there are a lot of characters to keep track of.

arwen

karo

this was beautiful. but also very very ugly and awful. not the book itself, the people. the story is rough, but its real. heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. in the first half of the book i wanted to hug and protect every single person in this book. in another half, i wanted to kill some of them and see them suffer, and to protect even more the rest. no book made me feel such a rage. i wanted to scream. i cried. i loved the writing. i loved the storytelling. it was incredible immersive it felt as i live with them in that small town. beautiful. tragic.
and i like benji

aleksandra

5/5

There are authors who can make you fall in love with their story, even if nothing that exciting happens, simply by their writing. Fredrik Backman falls into this category. This book was so simple, yet so beautiful. At some points I needed to look out the window and just think for a moment after what I read. That’s how hard this story hit me. 


I never thought that a book about a tiny community living in a small town nestled deep in the forest will leave me speechless at the end. A small town where, for most people, hockey is the most important thing. Sometimes, too important. A small town called Beartown, whose people, despite being aware of the hardships of life there, will not leave it, because it’s their town. Beartown, a place I don’t really know how to feel about, because I hated it and some of its people, but at the same time I loved it and felt extremely connected to it. 


  
    “No one could have a better mom than you. No one.” 
“We can move, darling. We can . . .” 
“No.” 
“Why not?” her mom cries. “Because this is my fucking town too,” the girl replies."

"you’ll have much better opportunities to develop there.” Benji gives a nonchalant shrug. His answer is as short as it is uncompromising: “But I’m from Beartown.”
  



The main reason I fell in love with this story is its characters. Ana, Maya, Benji, Kira, Peter, Amat, Fatima, Sune and Ramona. There were many more, but these particular ones stole my heart. I laughed and I cried with them, I wanted to get into the book and hug them, or scream at them. The fact that after reading just the first few chapters I already felt a connection with all of them only confirm my belief that Fredrik is a brilliant writer. Each of them was special in their own way, but I must admit that Kira was my favorite. She was so strong, she loved with all her heart, and her relationship with her children and husband was so precious. I could easily write entire essays about each of them, especially Benji, Sune, Fatima, Amat, and Peter, but my review would probably be too long to post here, so I'll just say that each of these characters taught me something new and I am very grateful for this. I can't wait to finish their story in the next books. 

The view on friendship, parenthood, marriage, being a woman, growing up, your sexuality and race were portrayed in a such realistic way. I actually loved how real this book felt, it’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed it to this extent. 


  
    "Peter and Kira are sitting in the kitchen, holding each other’s hands. “Do you think I’m less of a man because I can’t fight?” he whispers. 
“Do you think I’m less of a woman because I can?” she asks."
  


I'm also a big fan of the way the author created female characters here. My history with women written by a man in books is, let’s say, not so good. But, here? The women here were amazing. Living in a small community full of men, where male-dominated sport was the point of too many people's lives, where misogynistic words were spoken from the mouths of too many men, was difficult, but the heroines here were strong, supported each other and did not give up despite many terrible situations.


I debated whether I should rate it four and a half or five, but Fredrick is a damn good writer and this book and its characters deserve those five stars. I can’t wait to dive into the next books. I know they will hurt, but I’m ready. At least, I hope I am.

Hannah Yoon

I wish I could put into words how good this book was. Fredrick Backman knows how to weave you into a story, bring all the characters together and have you care for each and every one of them. It was a slow start, but I think this is done intentionally. Powerful, moving and tragic all at once.

Claire Jorgensen

Kendall McClain

Jasmine Ghartey

backman has mastered the art of seamlessly blending the lives of 50 million characters in one book. I don't know how he does it. I think he did an amazing job at depicting rape culture and what being in a small town where the same ideas are recycled through generations without anyone questioning them, does to people. there were times where I felt like he let the bubble of this being a fiction book pop and poured his feelings of anger and disgust of how the rapist is coddled and victimized while the victim themselves, is villainized. It read like a condemnation of rape culture and groupthink. 

choosing to write about a small, financially insecure town whose only form of light and hope is not just hockey, but whoever the star player is, was a brilliant backdrop to condemn these faults in our society because its more explicit with less distractions to shy away from the faults with influences of a larger society. the star player is supposed to be their way out, a way to their make their lives better and worth living. so they choose blissful ignorance. their money makers can do no wrong, because their money makers are their beacons of hope. 

this way of thinking is fucked up and unhealthy and breeds young boys into young men into fully grown men who were never allowed and taught to be human. only to be winners. and if they're not treated as such, they lash out in anger and throw temper tantrums because you won't treat them as immortal and give them what they want. and this extends beyond sports, as we all already know. 

thank you sm if you read all of this, I know its a lot to read and digest, but this is what “beartown” is. when I talk to my friends about SA, we always say "when" it will happen to us instead of "if", and it shouldn't be like that at all.

Loved the writing. Definitely a tough read at times, but it’s hard to put it down once you hit the last third. 

chelsea

Jensyn Ronca

This was nothing like what I expected. I can count on one hand the amount of books I’ve read that have this effective of character building. I felt every emotion possible reading this, to be quite honest. 

I have never, ever come across a male author that depicts the trauma(s), rage, and seemingly constant disappointment that come along with growing up a girl and becoming a woman in this society in a way that actually feels real and genuinely empathetic, until now.

Katie Guo

Jenna Whitlow

4 stars

If you're like me and you're looking through Goodreads reviews to see if this book is worth continuing because you're around the 100 page mark and you're really not invested in the story - this is your sign to keep reading.

I found myself absolutely in love with Backman's lyrical and dramatic writing, but wholly uninterested in the cast of characters that we follow through this book. It took a long time for me to get sucked in but once I got there, I was in for the ride. For me, this was intended to be a palette cleanser after finishing the Poppy War by R. F. Kuang. I definitely did not realize how heavy the subject matter would be in this book. Definitely check trigger warnings. Alongside the atmosphere, the connection that was slowly built between certain characters became one of the strongest elements of the book for me. The setting, Beartown, almost became a character of its own.

VAGUE SPOILERS BELOW

I will say that there does come a point where I have a hard time sympathizing with certain characters. I think Backman tried to bring a level of humanization to our "villians", but I completely despised Kevin and his cohort. I almost felt disconnected from the conflict. There was no gray for me - either you were on Maya's side, or you're not. Others might be able to feel more connected to the supposed struggle the town as a whole is facing, but that was just not me.

taryn

I wanted to scream and cry throughout a lot of this, but it is emotional and haunting. Hits a little too close to home after growing up northern Canada as well.

TW: rape, assault, offensive language

This books gives you a lot to think about. Truly a lot of life lessons in this book that are written out and put right into your face while reading this book. 

The author really knows how to get you to love his characters and then makes you hate the ones you loved and love the ones you hated/ weren’t a fan of. 

I’m interested to see where the story goes, but I do think you could read this as a stand-alone and be fine as well. 

***If you have any triggers I would suggest you look up a list to see TW for this book! 

This books gives you a lot to think about. Truly a lot of life lessons in this book that are written out and put right into your face while reading this book. 

The author really knows how to get you to love his characters and then makes you hate the ones you loved and love the ones you hated/ weren’t a fan of. 

I’m interested to see where the story goes, but I do think you could read this as a stand-alone and be fine as well. 

***If you have any triggers I would suggest you look up a list to see TW for this book! 

The Scandal

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