Bear Town

“It’s only a game. It only resolves tiny, insignificant things. Such as who gets validation. Who gets listened to. It allocates power and draws boundaries and turns some people into stars and others into spectators. That’s all.”

5/5

It is far harder to write about books I loved than ones I didn’t, and I absolutely loved this book. It tells the story of a small town, a hockey town, that pins all its hopes and dreams and expectations onto the junior hockey team. When a violent act shatters the barrier between what happens on the ice and off, the very worst and the very best of the town comes roaring to the surface.

Each character in Backman’s novel jumps off the page from the moment they are introduced; he could get me emotionally invested in a new character after only a few pages, a few paragraphs even. There are no flat characters, no caricatures, no half-measures.

The story tears your heart out while simultaneously destroying your faith in humanity and restoring it. We see love, bravery, and sacrifice. We see hate, violence, and depravity.

There is a lot to learn from this novel; it asks challenging questions and gives no simple answers. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

In an effort to be even handed, I have one nitpicky complaint. The last hundred pages or so leaned heavily on forced misdirection in the service of surprise twists. I wouldn’t mind this once or twice, but it happened often enough I started to doubt everything I was reading and saw the hand of the author too clearly pulling the strings. For a book tied so closely to the characters’ thoughts and emotions, to have a sudden distance in the service of twists felt cheap.

Some underline-worthy quotes:

“Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith…that’s just between you and God.”

“You can get almost anything to look normal if you make enough comparisons.”