Reviews with content warning for Xenophobia - Beartown

It's been 3.5 years since I first read this book. I was a bit scared rereading this; scared it would not hold up to how utterly magical it felt to read this for the first time. But the truth is that it was even better than I remembered. The writing is sublime; the characters are complex; the story is so well-interwoven. I've never read anything like this book and I will sing its praises until everyone around me has read this.

Content Warnings

hawkguyscoffee's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A thoroughly interesting story, I couldn't take my eyes off the book the moment I got into it, Though slow paced and repetitive, these are the things that make the writer's writing style really charming and unique and what eventually you come to love. Though I don't entirely agree with many views expressed in the book, I can clearly see that it mostly tries to analyse where someone comes from and what makes them think and do what they do, even when it looks senseless to the outsiders, rather than analyse wether is was wrong or right. I also loved how even on a book so focused on the aforementioned, it still unequivocally condems things like rape, homophobia and misogyny
because, as the book itself states,

"This town doesn’t always know the difference between right and wrong, but we know the difference between good and evil"

. Another thing I thoroughly loved was it's treatment of friendships and how it was captivated perfectly in both the adults and the youngsters. Finally, I'd like to add that I loved the descriptions of both the town and the players feelings, who were so vivid you could feel the cold on your nose and the passion for the sport in your heart.

Content Warnings

bealmg's review against another edition

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dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I appreciated the themes it explored. On the other hand, I disliked its structure and the author's writing style.
Let's start by what I disliked. First, the enormous cast of characters. While this is a book about a town and its people, it didn't need to delve into the minds of so many characters, many of which added very little to the actual plot. It literally shoved in the reader's face that this was a book about a small town where everybody knows everybody and hockey is the one thing that keeps the town alive.
This is tied to the way the book is structured. At first, I thought it was interesting, but an entire book composed of snippets of characters' lives and thoughts quickly became repetitive. Because of this, the reader doesn't get to spend enough time with the main characters and each character felt incomplete by the end of the book. Besides that, on a few particularly emotional plot points , the snippets become shorter and manipulative, the narrator leading you to think something terrible is going to happen and then it doesn't (

like when Zacharias enters the school and the reader thinks he'll kill himself, only to find out he cleaned Maya's locker; Maya pointing a gun at Kevin but not killing him in the end

).
Lastly, I really didn't like the writing style. It's full of aphorisms that are clearly meant to be thought-provoking, but instead tell the reader what to think and feel about the story (as opposed to, you know, letting the readers decide for themselves). I also didn't appreciate the heavy and way-too-obvious foreshadowing, which removed the tension from the story, as well as the insights into what these characters would feel and think about in the future. As a reader, I felt that I was too often told what the characters felt instead of shown what they were feeling. It was exhausting having a narrator constantly tell me things that I wanted to piece together myself.
Now, onto what I liked (but also felt could have been better). I liked the themes of the book. The small town experience and its sports culture (with its inherent violence, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia) was a really interesting theme to explore, but I feel like Backman tried too hard to write about everything that nothing felt truly, completely, deeply explored, partly because of the way he structured this book. And although it made me think about my own experiences living in a country obsessed with football (or soccer, whatever you call it), I felt that it added nothing new to the discussion.

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