Beartown by Fredrik Backman

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anxious People, a dazzling and profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true.

By the lake in Beartown is an old ice rink, and in that ice rink Kevin, Amat, Benji, and the rest of the town’s junior ice hockey team are about to compete in the national semi-finals—and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Under that heavy burden, the match becomes the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown.

This is a story about a town and a game, but even more about loyalty, commitment, and the responsibilities of friendship; the people we disappoint even though we love them; and the decisions we make every day that come to define us. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

Why I Picked It Up

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People love Beartown (or dislike it—there's a fair dose of that, as it's that polarizing kind of book), and my family told me it would make me cry. So it's been one of my "rainy day reads" on my shelf for forever, saved up for a summer or moment. I started it in January but wasn't in the mood so put it down.

I ended up finally picking up Beartown on audio, actually, because a library hold I'd forgotten I'd placed came in. I'm not a huge audiobook person (because I'm very picky about narrators), but have been enjoying them lately. I'll ride that kick for as long as it lasts—probably just another week or two.

Beartown is actually successful on audio in a way I wouldn't have predicted, which I'll get into when I dissect the style and voice below: essentially, the book balances a large cast in third-person, constantly reorganizing them into groups and divisions within the small town by virtue of which labels they most belong to (ex: team vs. family, adults vs. children, etc,.) which speaks a lot to how people absorb different values depending on who they're around in the first place. It does an incredible job illuminating the universal within the specific, my hallmark of a "great" book.

I finished the book in paperback because I was eager to get it done, and had a tougher time adjusting to the narration, so I realized that so much of the structure benefited from the audio telling (short chapters, switching POVs, etc,.) and made it so digestible in that way. So if you're like me and only a very occasional audiobook listener, this would be a great one to try!

About the Book

Beartown isn't so much notable for the plot (shocking event sends ripples through an isolated community centered around one pursuit), which has been done before, but for how it turns that event into a symbol of all these smaller ruptures and rifts between people, both individually and in how they see each other.

Basically, the first half of the book sets up each character's stakes: what makes them lonely, what drives them, who they're trying to protect, how weary they are of the town or how willing they are to fight for it.

Beartown is a poor community, centered around the factory (which is always hemorrhaging jobs) and their hockey club. For that reason, the junior team this year being on the verge of a championship is a massive deal, attracting sponsors and attention and audience members who need the team to win because they've placed all their flimsiest senses of rightness onto the backs of these 17-year-old boys who are just as flawed as they all are.

For the love of hockey

I think where the book excels first is in expressing the purpose of rooting for a goal or a sport or a team, and how necessary that is. I frequently say that I love books about prodigies or goals or similar esoteric pursuits because if you can make me love something even a fraction as deeply as a character does, I never lose that appreciation. It makes my world feel a little bit bigger.

And now I feel that way about...hockey? Sure, I'd watch casually. (I'm from Tampa.) I appreciate any athleticism, team fervor, whatever. But Backman gets so deep into the sensations of it that I now want to romanticize the sport in the same way that Beartown residents do, and I'm always grateful when a book does that to me. Give me the love for something. Anything.

As someone who also just completed a multi-year tunnel visioned pursuit, I also have a lot of empathy and feeling centered around what exactly it means to pour everything you are into the pursuit of something that will change who you are. The pursuit does, but then the resulting identification does too.

“Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

I have voice notes recorded on my phone about what it's like to work so hard for something, what it's like to sand yourself down to your most distilled form in the pursuit of excellence, what it does to you to reach the point at which you have done everything and now you're waiting judgment. Moment of grace or whatever. Who gets it and who doesn't.

The book constantly examines the gap between those who say "it's just hockey" and those who start to view it as an integral catalyst for their own sense of self. You know? And that's how I feel about what I do. Admittedly, there's also something so gorgeous and gratifying to me about reading that feeling within a book and knowing there are those just as hungry as I am (albeit fictional.) For anything.

How groups form and diverge

The other key part of the book, I think, is analyzing who sorts themselves in which ways, and how those dividing lines are created. How that ripples into what people do and say and feel, and how we convince ourselves to be part of the community or outside of it based on our perceptions of isolation, belonging, shared values, or whatever. (If you were curious on the nonfiction side, Cultish by Amanda Montell would be a great read for you. Adam Alter also has interesting research on how the titles we give ourselves change how we behave.)

If you asked an average reader to describe Beartown who'd read the book, regardless of if they thought positively or negatively, they'd probably describe it as culty.

“There are few words that are harder to explain than "loyalty." It's always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.”

“One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don't turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are.”

Sweeping parallels of human nature

I'll talk about this more in my (reader-requested) voice note on the book, but Fredrik Backman is such a satisfying example of form feeding function and vice versa. I need to do an entire writerly craft post on how he constructs his sentences to be parallels and counterweights to each other and how that exemplifies the us vs. them theme of the book itself. Ah. I love when a voice just feels so enormously well-suited to the story it's telling and vice-versa; the two should be inseparable. That exact quality is what makes Beartown a phenomenal book to me.

“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.”

Now, this is also what makes the book a little polarizing to readers, if I had to guess.

The book's chapters are told in series of vignettes constantly flitting between different characters' heads. Beartown will show you a moment close to someone, then zoom out to muse about how it's the way we all work, then flit to someone else, and then maybe tie the two POVs together in a groupthink musing that explains how the groups within Beartown are shifting.

“It doesn't matter who sits together that day. Everyone eats lunch on their own.”

That style makes it sound boring (it's not) but it means that the overall feel is a little experimental. If you wouldn't like a random line break in the middle of the page that goes to a singular hard-hitting sentence about, say, the nature of adrenaline, you might struggle to acclimate to Backman's narration. But if you do, you're in for a treat.

The slice-of-life pacing and style, to me, made the book experience more cinematic and lent weight to the sense of Beartown as an ecosystem and an entity on the verge of collapse (or redemption, depending on how you look at it.) Why does community matter? What are people holding onto?

Pacing & Voice & Characterization

Like I said, I'll get more into the themes of everything when book-clubbing it on the voice note (because I could dig into this book for a long time), but what's notable to me is that it takes me forever to read/listen to an audiobook, but I finished half of this one in a single night while cleaning. I'm not sure the last time I would have done that; even while driving on a road trip, I can't listen to audiobooks the full way through because the noise similarity elapsed over hours will make me sleepy. I need to switch up my inputs enough.

So the snippet-style narration made Beartown easy to rip through, especially on audio. I was enamored by the sense of place, and the claustrophobic setting combined with such specific sensory details is absolutely my catnip when it comes to books I'd call escapist. The swirling snow, the threat of falling into the ice, the shadowy black jackets. And then the boys—for various reasons—clinging to the rush they'd get from the sport. The screaming crowds. The frazzled mom, the coaches mourning burnt coffee. It's all vivid without sacrificing the depth of each moment.

Combine that with clever line-level philosophies and you've got a Grace book. Backman is a line-level writer and so am I, and I love an opportunity to be a line-level reader.

Beartown does a great job showing how everyone's evolved into these moments and choices. Nobody feels flattened or false. Rock-and-a-hard-place characterization dominates, which I appreciate. And then, he balanced some people having classic hero moments and others mismatching their thoughts and actions—showing that, when it comes down to it, some people just fail or aren't willing to sacrifice their pride or make the choice you don't like or ignore what's inconvenient for them. The overall effect is bittersweet, balancing a healthy dose of realism and other, earned moments of payoff. It's just a mix, one underlying how we let groups define us and how we draw our lines. How much is invisible below the surface!

Overall Thoughts

There is so much I loved about Beartown, which is why I'm restraining myself from going into too much detail. I devoured this book once I was in the headspace for it (right book, right time is so real) and I love that it gave me a new love and appreciation for the texture of hockey and why it matters to people. When I voice note, I have a lot of thoughts on this theme of how "almost isn't enough" and how that edge—and our longings for that to be different—literally defines the book.

I'm always a fan of a book that gets risky with voice and formatting. If it works, it really works, and that's the case for me here. I love his cleverness with wordplay (and I'd be curious for those reading in the original language; major props to his translator, and you can get deep in the weeds in translation as an art form and who's responsible for which intangible essences of the work itself.)

Backman's style echoes and feels resonant, which is why I think it can feel like "a lot" to people—but is also why it sticks. The width of the cast will either work for you or not, but the creative choice overall underscores his themes of how groups and communities either unify or fracture, and how that can happen in these tiny moments that ripple outwards.

Atmosphere for me is crucial in books I adore, and Beartown has it in spades. (For an apt comparison, I pictured True Detective: Night Country in many ways; the book has a very specific wintery flavor I craved from narratives like A History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund.)

The close-knit, small-town intrigue and anguish of Mare of Easttown, perhaps. And the warm, expanded catharsis of a book like Holly Goldberg Sloan's I'll Be There by Holly Goldberg Sloan. I will reread this at some point, I'm sure, and right now I'm continuing with the rest of the series. I'll probably review Us Against Them because the themes shift slightly there too.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Individual lines were my favorite, but if I were to share all of my underlines, you'd have practically the entire book in front of you.

If you catch me watching hockey games after this, mind your business.

For fans of:

clever lines and balances / The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

need for a pursuit unifying a group / Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins-Reid

wintery setting / A History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

bittersweet cast with ripple effects / I'll Be There by Holly Goldberg Sloan

format getting a little weird / I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

groupthink / Cultish by Amanda Montell

fear of isolation, what you're responsible for / East of Eden by John Steinbeck

intoxicating small-town stakes / Mare of Easttown (show)

You could veer towards hockey books specifically too, but so you know: nowadays, many of them are settled firmly within the romance genre—so might have significantly more heat. About human nature, but in a different way (ha.) In which case, opt for:

hockey, mmm / Spiral by Bal Khabra