That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. “It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. And with them the book begins to pull you in slowly, inexorably until you’re racing through the second half of the book, heart pounding, emotions always at the surface. And while Backman effortlessly manages to switch between characters and threads, and is successful in pulling it together on a tapestry, the moments I enjoyed the most were the small ones (and there were many). It’s about dreams and hope and possibility. Which, more often than not, isn’t the case. Its residents aren’t afraid of hard work or things being difficult, but they do expect fairness. There’s a saying in Beartown that life is supposed to be hard.
About power, manipulation, money, survival. This is about two towns, Beartown and Hed and two games of hockey, but also about so much more. The first 60 odd pages are almost a recap of the first book, and unlike the intimate passion that was possible with a small story about big things, in Us Against You, the stakes are larger purely because the stage is bigger. Now, this book doesn’t immediately grab you and emotionally overwhelm you like Beartown did. Can this fallen town build itself back up? But he is a politician looking for his own gain. And then, a surprise candidate materialises as saviour. Of their hockey club, of their jobs, of a crumbling economy. But there’s little enjoyment in this short respite from 9 months of snow, darkness, and the cold – this town and its people are worried about the future. Beartown, the small, seemingly insignificant, ice-hockey-obsessed town in the Swedish wilderness, is reeling from everything that happened in a season that was supposed to bring them a junior hockey championship, but instead exposed the cracks under the surface and pitted the town against itself and its inhabitants against each other. The book picks up where the other left off. It should tell you something when I devoured this in two days as well. Soon after, I was excited to learn that the author had planned a trilogy and that the second book was already out. “People will say that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that won’t be true, because it was already here.”īeartown, which I read last month, was my first book by Fredrik Backman and I glowingly reviewed it on here.
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