Beartown

I adore sports romance. This is not a sports romance novel, but it stole and broke my heart.

Beartown distills the joys and horrors of small-town life and how one choice carries consequences for nearly everyone, particularly when the community’s existence depends on the triumphs of its youth hockey teams.

This novel digs deep into the love and fear that shape the relationships of parents and children, the pressures of adolescence, and how we fail each other. While Beartown is driven by grief in many ways, at its heart, it’s a story of hope and redemption.

If you want a break from fantasy and sci-fi, and you love a book with morally grey characters, then this is it.

Beartown is a town that survives on hockey. The kids play it, the grown-ups work in anything related, and just like in sports, both sides consider themselves the good side in every action they take.

We follow the manager of the hockey club as he must make impossible decisions, then the players, each making their own mistakes. We see villains grow from a place that we can understand, and we see good people making bad calls because… show more.

You could describe Fredrik Backman’s Beartown as the story of a broken Swedish forest town whose fate is tied to the success of a kids’ hockey team. This is accurate but woefully incomplete. In fact, I’m confident you’ll feel all the anger, empathy, and tenderness Backman has woven into a sports story that transcends pucks and goals. You will be ushered forward and backward in time. You’ll feel carried ahead even as the author freezes moments that deliver depth and perspective. The pivotal event will make your heart race. And in the end, you will wind up missing the people… show more.

I love hockey so this book was an easy one for me to pick up. Once I started reading, however, I was so impressed with the “other” story surrounding the hockey team. To me, it was the story. This is a powerful read that stayed with me long after I turned the last page. I really appreciated that the hockey action and facts were well researched. There are multiple points of view, and all are handled with skill. 

Beartown has so many aspects to it that I love in a book, I’m not sure where to start. Small town, sport, rich versus poor, family tension, first love, secrets, a crime, strong female characters – it’s all there in this book, plus a skilled author with a distinctive strong voice who is constantly asking questions and answering them, and hitting the reader with truth after truth about growing up, about how money controls sport, about the pressure on young people, and about loyalty and sacrifice. 

This novel isn’t exactly feel-good but it has moments of glimmering hope and it’s… show more.

This book is both inspiring and troubling at the same time, and I use that word—troubling—in a praiseworthy sense. To write a story about a town’s hopes resting on a group of young hockey players seems easy at its surface. That story, the scrappy young athletes going against the bigger, better, richer teams, is the stuff movies are made of. But what Backman does by pitting a town’s despair from economic woes with the horrors of allegations of abuse puts the reader at the center of the same difficult crossroads the characters are facing. How do you celebrate when it… show more.

I was a collegiate downhill and giant slalom racer but could never skate. But in my adulthood, I really got hooked on NHL hockey and have had, until this year, Anaheim Ducks season tickets since 2000. Greatest mind-blowing violent ballet sport of all time. So I read this book Beartown because it is about hockey. It’s really more about a one-sport town in the Canadian provincial wilderness dying, and the rape that started Beartown circling the drain.