Book Review: Beartown, by Frederik Backman

Beartown trigger warning: Rape of a teenage girl (but the real trauma is what happens when she decides to report her sexual assault, and I wish that wasn’t so relatable for so many of us).

It took me a long time to get into this one. There were at least 10 slow-ish chapters mostly about the town and hockey, and I had to force myself to stick with it, sensing something beautiful on the other side. (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was like this for me as well, and we know well how that turned out.)

You know when an artist starts a painting, and it looks disjointed and uninteresting... and then halfway through, you see it start to come together and you can’t look away, it's just so gorgeous? That was Beartown.

Hockey is a character in this book; a living, breathing, feeling thing. To do justice to the story, I had to be indoctrinated into the relationship the small town has to its hockey clubs, and the way each character was entwined with both.

One it took off, it was glorious; achingly beautiful, incredibly vibrant... and also hard. Really hard. But in the end, it left me feeling hopeful, wistful, proud, and heartbroken-then-whole-again in the very best way. I'm not sure I've been so enamored with a character since Wavy (All the Ugly and Wonderful Things), but Benji is forever seared into my heart.

Read it. Just make sure you have someone to talk to when you're done.

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