Beartown

By Frederik Backman, Atria Books Translation Edition, 2017, 432 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, Sept. 12, 2020

Fredrik Backman writes stories about quirky, loveable, annoying, wonderful people. “A Man Called Ove,” “Britt-Marie was Here,” “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry,” are his stock-in-trade titles. “Beartown” is not.

Beartown is a small hamlet in a Swedish forest where the town’s economy is dying and there’s precious little to get excited about. Thank God for the hockey team. The unimaginatively named Bears are a junior team, boys 21 and younger, part of the old-school development system that produced players for the European, Russian, Canadian and American professional leagues. Junior hockey is to rural towns throughout the Northern Hemisphere what high school football is to Texas. The players change from year to year but the team binds the town, giving the banker and the lumberjack something to talk about at the diner or the hardware store and the coach is a local celebrity as long as the team keeps winning.

“We are the Bears from Beartown,” the players and fans chant, just in case anyone was confused. But the Bears are not merely from Beartown, the Bears are Beartown.

Backman plays out a slow-build thriller disguised as both a coming-of-age tale and a sports novel. The villain commits an unspeakable act and the players, their friends, the parents, and the fans must all decide what’s really in the best interest of the team and, by extension, the town. Do they keep the secret or speak out? Which path would be the lesser disaster?

Backman gets us there with honed human insight that comes out in a sentence that reaches up and slaps you in the face:

She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman.”

Words are not small things.

There are few novels about hockey and even fewer sports novels that go so far beyond petty rivalries and underdog heroes. Backman delivers characters every bit as intimately as the brilliantly drawn heroes in his other works, but “Beartown’s” cast isn’t populated with the peculiar invisible people his other works are. These young men are jocks, town superstars shouldering the weight of the town’s prosperity or failure. And it’s not easy to be that kind of metaphor when you’re a 19-year-old hockey player with a weak slapshot.

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.

It’s a sports story so we expect a come-from-behind happy ending in which everyone does the right thing and it all works out in the end. Fortunately, Backman isn’t that shallow and this story isn’t “Miracle.” It’s emotionally hard, just like adolescence, just like owning a struggling business, just like carrying too much of the town’s weight, and especially like doing what you think is right even when the consequences look bleak.

You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love “Beartown.” You just have to be a person.

Reviewed by Sue Fountain, Nov. 23, 2020

I'm going to steal a line from Ted Streuli: "You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love “Beartown.” You just have to be a person."

It was that line that convinced me to read Beartown by Fredrik Backman. Not only am I not a hockey fan, I am not even a sports fan in general. Reading about the inside game of hockey did not bring me any closer to liking it; it's a brutal sport. However, I read Ove by Backman and know he is a good writer so I gave this book a try.

It takes place in a small, northern town where hockey is the focus of everything and everybody, but there is a lot more to it than that. It is a book about choices that we make in life, and the choices the young players have to make in this story have consequences for the whole town.

The town's livelihood depends upon hockey, which is quite a load for teenagers to carry. Backman manages to bring in heavy subjects like rape, murder, bullying, sexual orientation – he covers a lot of ground.

I wouldn't say that I loved the book, but I couldn't put it down. I became so interested in all of the various characters that I had to see what was going to happen. Backman’s special skill is knowing how to bring his characters to life.

Reading a sports novel was a stretch for me, but I liked the book, and I recommend it.