Spoiler-free Book Review of Beartown by Fredrik Backman

I have never been one for annotating, but I decided to give it a try, and what better book to try it with than Fredrik Backman's Beartown. So please enjoy this review of both Beartown, and my feelings on annotating while I read.

Fredrik Backman is quickly becoming one of my very favorite contemporary authors. A Man Called Ove, Anxious People, and now Beartown-- each one exceptional in it's own right.

I have already read and reviewed Anxious People at 5 stars, and retroactively would give A Man Called Ove 3 stars. Beartown sits solidly at 4 stars, and let me tell you why:

Beartown by Fredrik Backman is full of delicacy, insight, and heart.

It is delicate in the subject matter it tackles and address (see trigger warnings below for more information). Being able to write about traumatic and horrific things without being gratuitous is impressive. Backman writes about people, and in so doing is rather forced to write about painful and difficult subject matters. He handles the sadly every day occurrences of everyday people with a gentle and delicate hand. He does not gloss over the pain and the trauma, he is very blunt about it, but without glorifying it or relegating it to a shock factor. Every element of every character is important, because I truly believe that Backman sees every individual as equally important and impressive. The delicacy and gentleness and empathy in which Backman writes about the most painful experiences of human kind is truly beautiful.

Equally as beautiful is the impressive insight into human nature that Backman achieves in his writing. Every character, whether a primary, tertiary, or even a character with a paragraph of page-time, is well-rounded, real, and raw. Each character you meet in the town of Beartown is a character you might meet in your own hometown, or while on vacation somewhere. Each character is written with profound insight into the very marrow of what it means to be human: the pain, the pleasure, the beauty, the ugliness, the complexity, the simplicity, and everything in between.

The culmination of both Backman's delicacy and insight is that this book is written with a ton of heart. It takes heart to understand people, and another level to put that on paper truthfully. And Backman succeeds where so many fail.

So what is Beartown about? It is book one in a trilogy about a small town whose whole world is high school hockey. The sport plays a major role in every Beartown resident's life, and functions much like another character in the story. Unfortunately, when one of the players ruins someone's life before the big game, the town becomes divided in a battle of "he said, she said.” Children are forced to grow up too fast, and Beartown discovers the cracks at the foundation of its society.

And what did I find in attempting to annotate this book? In short, annotating is not for me. I would rather dog-ear a page to come back to if I find a quote I love. Annotating felt like it stopped me from really getting into the story; it interrupted my reading flow, if you will.

However, as I attempted to annotate this book I discovered motifs of coffee, the many different languages of love, cold, and the inability of parents to truly protect their children no matter how hard they try. At its heart, Beartown is a story about parents and their children. A story of relationships, and how “you never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”

I highly recommend Beartown. However, while this book is truly incredible, please use caution and do your research before reading.

Trigger Warnings and Adult Content: rape scene (and it's aftermath), misogyny, language, bullying, threatening, suicide/suicidal ideation, drugs, alcoholism, death of a child.