Now an HBO Limited Series
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.
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is 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.
Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is 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, leaving no resident unaffected.
Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.
I wish I could read Swedish
"The good news is that it's a compelling story of the ramifications of having a junior hockey team in an isolated small town. However. The book is a translation and suffers from the usual quota of awkward words and sentences which obviously don't translate well, presumably. But the book also needed an editor who knew something about the sport of hockey: defensemen (not ""backs""); practice (not ""training""); interference merits a penalty; small arenas do not have ""nosebleed sections""; hockey sticks are individualized for players. The author conveys emotion or fatigue by making the characters vomit (a lot). Apparently two boys can drag a boat through a forest (a forest!) that takes hours to walk. Maybe the original Swedish text used metaphor that the translator was oblivious to (can a woman slam a car door so hard the ""metal buckles""?). Many people can ignore absurdities in a movie and still enjoy it but I want more intelligence in literature. There's a pretty good book hidden here."
