Reviews with content warning for Vomit - 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.

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itsocchiolism's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

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meeklovestoread's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Okay, so when reading this I'm not gonna lie it's very slow in the beginning. And I even had the thought of dnf-ing because I was starting school and didn't have the time to stick through a book, but the concept was still intriguing to me and I loved "A Man Called Ove" so I stuck around for the author as well. Oh my goodness! I'm soooooo glad I dud! This book was phenomenal. But I feel like you have to like the way it was written to enjoy the story.

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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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soozn's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Right from the beginning this book feels ominous. Ominous and quiet and foreboding and profound. In a way, it reminds me of Twin Peaks or the movie Fargo in that it tells a big story woven together by little slice-of-life insights into being human with a lot darkness hanging over the whole thing.

It’s chock full of thoughtful and insightful commentary on the difficulties of being a person. What life does to us and what we do to each other. It’s cautionary tale after cautionary tale about all the ways we fail ourselves and one another. Backman uses his characters to point out our own foibles and blind spots. And I love how often he uses metaphors and similes to get across ideas and themes. There are so many and they’re so well done. They’re my favorite aspect of the book. [“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.”]

I love how unabashedly feminist the book is. It has a lot to say about the perils and insidiousness of misogyny without really having to SAY anything at all. I think Backman does an amazing job of showing how often women are casually disrespected, how often their talents are written off, their opinions dismissed, how they’re subject to the whims of violence and power of the men around them, how few people are willing to stand up for them. He also shows different ways they can take back the power that’s been taken from them and how hard it is to do so. Kira, Maya, Fatima, Adri, Jeanette, Kevin’s mom (who, rather appropriately due to her lack of agency, is never given a name) among others, all give us examples. Misogyny makes for a sinister background presence in this book.

I found it a little slow at times but Beartown is an extremely well written, powerful and thought-provoking work with important messages, great storytelling and excellent characters.

4 stars out of 5

⚠️ I honestly had no idea this was basically a story about Brock Turner. If I’d have known that, I probably wouldn’t have read it. This book was probably not one I should have picked up and I had a hard time getting through it. Heed the TW/CWs on this one, folks. 👇🏼

https://booktriggerwarnings.com/index.php?title=Beartown_by_Fredrik_Backman

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